Our trip to LA… day 1

Going on a trip is suppose to be relaxing and fun… but OMG the stress that comes with it is enough to drive you nuts!

On Thursday I drove down to Sterling Virginia to meet up with Denise.  I met her adorable little boy and her husband.  They are such a wonderful loving family and I am so glad to her as a friend.  She is exactly what I imagined from meeting her online when HarpersGlobe.com started up.  We went to eat dinner at this really nice diner that had a menu that was about as long as a Stephen King novel.  Every meal you could imagine.  The whole time I was there, her son Kyle had to talk to me.  He was treating me like I was one of his family… this included hand cuffing me, throwing me in solitary, and smacking me in the butt.  He was so cute and very smart at the age of 5!

We woke up early this morning to get to Dulles National Airport for our 9:05 flight.  I’ve never been on a place POST 911 so this was all new to me.  I never had such an extensive security check like I did there.

Shoes off…

laptop out of your bag…

all liquids in a quart size bag…

This was the beginning of the stress.

Finally at 8:30am we were boarding our flight to LA.  We were seated in seats 27B and C.  We had another woman sitting in seat A beside me.  After everyone was boarded, the captain came on and gave us the bad news that we would have to be delayed for about an hour.  Apparently, there was son scheduling problems and we had no co-pilot for the flight.  They called another one and he was on his way so we had to wait for him.  Our final take off time was around 10am.  Finally we were off the ground and 34,000 feet in the air. 

NO, I did not join the mile high club… even though Rachel thinks Denise and I did.

All went really well till we hit (not in the literal sense) the Rocky Mountains.  Suddenly our plane banked to the left and the next thing I know, people were screaming, flight attendants were sitting in the isle with the drink cart and I was looking almost straight down to the ground below us.  We leveled out and beeping started and then we dropped down and leveled out again and then once again we dropped and leveled out.  Denise doesn’t remember grabbing ahold of me but when she realized she had she was shaking like crazy.  I seriously thought we were going down.  The Captain came on the speakers telling us that a 747 had flown over top of us and we had hit a really bad patch of wind turbulence from them.   We later found out that everyone at the front of the plane pretty much got soaked from their drinks during that time.  MORE ADDED STRESS

We finally landed and found our driver.  We got to ride in a sweet executive car to our hotel.  We are currently staying at the Hilton.  It is so much fun.  Checking in was kind of interesting.  The guy that was checking us in was talking to us for a rather long time.  First he was talking to Denise about how the weather was in Virginia and how she liked it.  Later he starts to walk us around to the elevators and at the same time, tell us where to find everything.  He starts off by saying “if you guys like shrimp and steak” and we both replied “no”… sure I like steak but I do not like seafood.  He just looked at us funny and said “well thats what our specials are for today”.  He then showed us Starbucks and said something like “and if you like coffee..” and to that we replied “no”… He just laughed.  I told him that I had only been in a starbucks once and I don’t think he believed me!  He then showed us the elevator and stood there for awhile talking to us.  Finally we were off to our floor and ready to just drop on the bed and relax.

After a little bit of relaxing, we decided to go to City Walk for a bit.  We walked around for a while and found a nice place to eat.  We finally found Jillian’s and decided to eat there.  I had this really awesome hamburger and Denise had a turkey club.  After that we met up with Angelique.  We walked for a little bit with her and then went and drove around until we finally met up with Jenni Powell.  After we did that, we decided we needed to pick up the post cards that we said we were going to send out to friends.  We weren’t sure where we were going to get them so Ang decided to just go to Hollywood to find some good ones.  Needless to say… we went to Sunset Blvd.

Rach now thinks she is going to be our pimp…

After running around Hollywood we decided to end the night since we are both still running on east coast time.  According to my laptop clock, it is 1:44am there.

So, now we are sitting in our rooms, downloading our photos from the day, and relaxing…

MORE TOMORROW!

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