Thursday, January 1, 2009

White Christmas, Brown New Year

After Thanksgiving recess came dead week and then finals week: the downpoints of any college student's existence. I made it through my first Stanford finals alright and it was time to go home for the first time in three months to see my family for Christmas.

To say I had an uneventful trip home, though, would be a stretch...My friend John/Gym took me to the San Jose airport, arriving there around 5:20 am for my 7:08 flight. I went through the "easy check-in" right away, noticing that my flight was already delayed by over two hours. i waited in the line with the other Denver passengers to check my bag and luckily was at the front of the line. When they announced that the flight was on a mechanical delay of at least 4-6 hours, the ticket agent booked me onto another flight...this one out of San Francisco. I hopped in the shuttle (a.k.a. really small mini-van with six very large people in it for 45 minutes) and made it to SFO, got checked in, and got on the plane on time. After we had been sitting at the end of the runway for a few minutes the captain came on the intercom saying that they couldn't get the left engine to turn over and that we would need to return to the gate to have mechanics look at it. All of us sat in the airplane waiting while the starter was changed and finally took off, only about 2 1/2 hours late...Once I made it to Denver I was supposed to have a three-hour layover, but because of my habit of breaking airplanes I only had about twenty minutes to get to my next gate. That flight went on time and I made it to Omaha a few minutes early!

When I got home that evening it was about 55 degrees, but when I woke up the next morning it was 0 and decreasing quickly and never made it back into positive temperatures for the first three days of my visit. In that time we had Grandpa Gene's funeral and I just spent time with friends and family. Our "heat wave" that week brought us up around 15 degrees one afternoon! My last/only weekend at home was spent snowed in after a blizzard bringing not only snow, but temperatures in the -20s with wind chills as low as -47.

Christmas Eve was spent with my dad's family, Christmas day with Mom and Jay and his family, and the next morning it was time to head back to the airport.

My flights went off without a hitch. I made it back to San Jose, met Mikayla at the airport and got to the hotel where we repacked and got ready for the early morning. We loaded the bus with about half the team and headed for the airport.

I have now been in Tempe, Arizona for five days and still don't quite know what to think of it...I was just getting used to things being green in December at school, and now everything is brown!

Our New Year's Eve was spent with a supper for the team at Kerry's family's gorgeous house in the area and then at the Tempe Town Block Party where we got to see Styx perform.

Training camp has been very intense, but I'm really glad I've had this experience. The workouts can get crazy, but the moments over supper or in hotel rooms are irreplaceable.

1 comment:

Ali Renee said...

Wow you should really change the font on that...it's hard to read