Oh my goodness gracious!!!!
I’m gonna tell every little detail because I care too much, and sorry because I’m sure none of you care as much as I do, but for you, you can just skip to the parts strangers might find more interesting.
So, anyway, I’ll start by saying, I never took a traditional “spring break” in all of college or young adulthood, etc. So, it was really cool that this lined up with spring break!
Originally, I was supposed to be flying from New York, but forget that. Blah, blah, blah many reasons, but also, I wanted to fly with Alex, so he didn’t have to be alone for 6 hours!
We were texting on the way to LAX, like “What time do you think you’ll get there?” “What time do you think you’ll get there?”
And then I thought we weren’t on the same schedules, that I’d just meat him at the gate, but I was checking in, he came up behind me and I wanted to cry!
He’d been trying to throw me off slightly, so he could surprise me like that, because he’s quite literally the best.
It felt like forever since I’ve seen him, and when I turned to see who was tapping me, and saw him, my eyes got SO wide, and I gave him the most giant hug.
We checked in for the flight and headed to the gate.
At LAX, we just kind of caught up a bit. We walked around.
We went into the F.A.O. Schwartz there and saw the most GIANT stuffed animal – which was like over $1,000.
I’m think it might’ve been LAX where our Wordle/Octordle/etc excitement first happened. (We definitely played in New York when we had so much time at the layover, but we’ll get there.
So, anyway, we headed to first class, baby!
[Wheel of Fortune did not pay for first class, but they did fly us Jet Blue(!) without us even asking, which was amazing because it’s my favorite airline for life. And your girl has 80 billion points, so I upgraded myself and Alex, because I wanted to surprise him and have this trip be absolutely perfect, and I’m glad because a perfect trip did indeed start of perfectly.]
The pilot came and talked to us! He told us all about where we’d be flying and the weather looked great and all that. We felt like celebrities. Neither of us had ever had a pilot come just say hi for funsies on a flight before.
We talked a little at the start of the flight – especially with some ideas about what we were gonna do in Barbados, and ultimately, we fell asleep for the end of the flight, because we knew we had a long night ahead of us in NYC, and I’m sure his body was super confused about what time it was, since he had come from Singapore and was on his way to yet a new time zone.
We got to New York around 1am, and our next flight left at 8am.
I actually had an apartment in midtown because of grad school! So, we shortly considered going there, but because of how long we thought it would take and the expense, and how much time we’d actually get to spend there, it didn’t seem worth it. So, we stayed at the airport.
I had to pick up my bags, since I tacked on the LA > NY flight, since I told Wheel I wanted to go from New York [because that’s what I thought at the time].
Then there was this HUGE hours-long line forming for people to check their bags. We heard from someone the ETA was something like 3 hours. But thankfully we did not have to wait in it, since we got to go straight to the Jet Blue Mint (first class) area, and they re-checked my bags immediately with no hassle. Boom. Taken care of.
(Seriously. I love JetBlue. They don’t sponsor me in any way, but man would it be great if they did.)
Then security for some reason opened earlier than normal (maybe just because of the sheer amount of people there on apparently a very busy travel weekend). So, we went through and set up shop at a table and chairs to plan out the next week.
(Yes, perhaps we should’ve done this before, but we were both mega busy and on different timezones, so this was the easiest time to do this together, and thankfully we’d both done a fair amount of independent research, so we were ready to combine forces and figure things out!)
And this is where I’ll pick up next time!