Oregon, part 1

I finally have some time to write about my trip to Oregon. For this post, I'll write about the first day. I'm having major allergy issues today and recently took benadryl, so pardon any loopiness that may occur in this entry.

Thursday, August 24: Getting there is half the battle

It took us about 45 minutes to get through the check-in at the airport that night. We noticed that our flight was delayed by about 30 minutes, which was worrisome because we only had an hour to make our connecting flight in Denver. By the time we got our tickets and were in the gate, our flight was pushed back almost an hour. The next available flight was in the morning. We decided to get on the plane and hope for the best.

Throughout the flight, it seemed that we were going to end up spending the night in the Denver airport. I was preparing myself to do this. I almost thought it might be fun - an adventure - and might give me inspiration/material for my next novel. My only concern was that we wouldn't make it to our meetings at the university in Eugene, which was the main reason for going there in the first place.

When we got to Denver, we had five minutes to make it to our connecting flight, which was 10 gates away. On our KC flight, we met another person going to Portland, and he ran with Amanda and me through the Denver airport to get to our next flight. Actually, he ran way ahead of us. That dude was fast.

I was not so fast. I started out okay, considering I had a 40+ pound laptop bag to carry as I ran. Unfortunately, I was wearing jeans that were a little loose - I probably needed a size smaller - and as I ran, the waist of my pants started to slip lower and lower. It got to the point where they were almost off my butt. I tried to hold them up, but my computer case was in the way and throwing me off balance. I had a vision of me tripping and landing sprawled out on the floor of the terminal with my jeans around my ankles. It was not a pleasant thought. I had on decent underwear, but still. After a few more failed attempts to keep my pants from heading south, I stopped running. Even if I missed my flight, at least I'd have my dignity.

It turns out that our connecting flight was delayed, so there was no need to run. Eric, the guy from our flight, got there ahead of us and ran back to tell us that we were going to get there just fine. What a good guy.

We finally got into the Portland airport around 12:30 am, which was 2:30 to my body. We still had to get our rental car so we could drive down to Eugene in the morning. We were supposed to get a compact car (cheap) such as a Neon or something like that. Well, I'm not sure if the rental car guy took pity on us or what, but he gave us a free upgrade. Here's the car we ended up with:



Yes, that's a Mustang convertible. Yeah, baby. After a rough start to our trip, things were starting to look up...

posted by elizabeth @ 8:37 PM