Jonah certainly gets around. He has now been to the east coast (New England), Ohio, the south (Houston), and now he's made it to the west coast with our Memorial Day weekend trip to Seattle.
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| Seattle! |
Before the trip, we started to teach him to say Seattle and talked about how we would take a big airplane to get there. In "Jonah-speak" each syllable is very pronounced to be See-att-uhl. He somehow picked up the association with Washington through us talking about it and surprised us one day by saying Washington when we talked about Seattle. Because of this, we taught him that Seattle is in the state of Washington. While he doesn't know what that means yet, we do show off by asking him what state Seattle is in to make some jaws drop when he says Washington.
We left for the airport right after work on the Thursday before Memorial Day. Scheduled to get into Seattle pretty late, we were looking forward to having a somewhat relaxing day to get adjusted to the time change and see a couple sites. It wasn't meant to be.
Even before I left home to pick up Michelle and Jonah, I was getting updates from Delta stating that our first flight was delayed. The time kept getting pushed back. When we finally got to the point to drop off our luggage, the airline had formed a line so they could make the appropriate re-bookings for people who were going to miss their connections.
After waiting in line for a long time and watching a couple of Delta agents not being very useful behind the counter, we finally got our opportunity. Because the airlines pack all the planes as full as possible, they no longer have any true backups for the times when people miss flights, even when it is the airline's fault. The agent told us the best she could do was get us into Seattle about 8:30 pm the next day, which we didn't like as an option because we would lose an entire day of our vacation trip and because we had tickets to a baseball game.
The agent was trying to come up with other options, and at one point even mentioned some crazy plan to send us from Chicago to Cincinnati to Salt Lake City to Seattle. I don't want to do that solo. With a kid? No. Freaking. Way.
We got lucky. As she was checking, two seats opened up on one of the five flights to Seattle from Minneapolis the next day. She double booked us in the very slim chance we were able to make the flight that night (the Milwaukee to Minneapolis flight was delayed because of weather earlier in the day causing delays that eventually forced an issue with flight crew schedules).
To make a long story short, we missed the flight. Jonah got to learn a new word (sh**) from the guy across the aisle from us who also missed the Seattle flight (The kid repeats anything you don't expect him to repeat these days). The airline put us up for the night and gave us meal coupons to use for breakfast the next day. I called the hotel in Seattle to make sure we didn't lose our room (which had its own little adventure... They had us checked in already!), and we called it a night.
We got to the airport early the next morning and were shocked at the length of the lines to get through security. I think it was the one time Michelle has been thankful for the traveling I do for work, because we were able to go through the expedited security line with my airline status.
At any rate, we had a nice sit down breakfast and then hung out at the airport until our flight. We got Jonah worn down pretty good walking around the airport. He slept nearly the entire flight after the plane went "really fast!" and took off.
Getting to the shuttle at the SeaTac was grueling with all our luggage. What an absolute pain between the ups and downs and all arounds to finally get there. But get there we did. And get to the room we somehow managed to check into from Minneapolis we finally did, as well.
After getting settled, we decided we didn't have enough time to do much besides leisurely make our way to the ballpark and grab some dinner. On the way, we stopped briefly into the mobbed Pike Place Market and found the quilt shop Michelle wanted to check out.
We eventually ended up at a restaurant near the ballpark for dinner. Just as we were paying the bill, we looked outside to see it raining really hard. Jonah liked seeing the police car across the street and wanted to "get in!!" By the time we began walking the final stretch to the ballpark, the rain had lightened up quite a bit. There was enough rain for them to close the roof, though.
According to our seat neighbors, once they close the roof, they don't open it again, but we were surprised when they opened the roof up just before the game began.
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| Opening the roof at Safeco Field in Seattle |
We had seats out in right-center field and really enjoyed the game. We got to see Ichiro have a pretty good game.
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| Ichiro! |
And we got to see Albert Pujols, now of the Los Angeles Angels (of Anaheim) hit a home run about six seats away from us. Jonah had a great time dancing with the music, ...
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| ...cheering with the crowd,... |
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| ...playing with the seats,... |
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| ...and giving Mommy funny looks. |
We ended up leaving after the 7th inning because we were exhausted and still needed to get back to the hotel, so we missed the Angels coming back to win it in the 9th inning. Oh, well...
Check out more pictures from the game and Seattle on our picture site. More posts from the trip to come!
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