the fear...

Do you ever get the feeling that the clocks are all wrong, you weren't paying attention, and you might have missed the boat?  Well, it was sort of like that...   Tom & I are in Portland this weekend visiting family.  We threw a party for Miki & Marty last night - for all the young friends, rather than a bachelorette party.  It was all fun & games, plus wine-tasting.  We spent the day shopping and prepping food, and then, voila!  We had a terrific time.  The "newlyweds" game went over with lots of laughter.  About twenty bottles of wine were finished off.  And we got to sleep in today.   But getting her Thursday was the reason for the fear.  Our last two trips were wrought with snowstorms - in Portland at Christmas and in Denver for Grandma's funeral.  We'd checked the weather a few times, confirming that there was severe rain expected, but nothing to slow us down.  We planned to carry our bags on the planes, so we printed our boarding passes and lounged around Denver a little longer than usual (for our usual 9:40 pm flight to Portland that lands at 11:15 pm - we've flown it three times already).  The parking lots were full at the airport, so we had to drive a little further into the boonies to another lot, waited and drove in a little further on the bus.  Security was a breeze, and we took up residence in our favorite quiet section overlooking the terminal.  We heard on the loud speaker that stormy weather was causing a flight to California to board and leave early and wished that we would befall the same luck.  A couple chapters of our books later, we looked at the time and saw that the plane would preboard in about 5 minutes.  We turned back to our books to the sound of "Will Ms Victoria ford and Mr Thomas Vigil please come to gate A26?"  Holy cow!!!  Were we that lucky to be leaving early and didn't hear them announce that they were boarding????  We grabbed our bags and ran down to the gate.  Three different gates occupied the corner of the terminal, so people were lined up in every direction.  A little out of breath, we threw our boarding passes on the counter and announced our arrival to find out that a family had been seated in our row and needed to be moved because of the children; would we kindly switch seats to the exit row?  Sure, no problem.  We ended up with less legroom in seats that didn't recline, but we were ten rows closer to getting off the plane when we landed...small consolation, but we were sure relieved not to have missed our flight....the end my friend.