How the days fly when you’re on vacation.

My poor neglected bloggy audience: I haven’t forgotten you. I have just been caught up in a whirlwind of traveling and the flip-flopping of vacation locations (wherein I flew home and my sister followed me, 23 hours later).

Of course, that doesn’t mean we’ve been without stories. For instance. Friday, whilst killing two hours before my flight boarded, I was attempting to find a Dunkin’ Donuts at the Philadelphia airport. I realized during my stay that Philadelphia is much like New England: if you can’t see a Dunkin’ Donuts within 100 yards of you, you get nervous. And paranoid. And the DTs set in. Anyway, I had taken advantage of having my favorite donut coffee shop around (large coffee: three creams, one sugar) and by golly, I wanted one more coffee from Dunkin’ before I got on my plane and headed to the land of Starbucks Only. Would you believe there wasn’t a Dunkin’ in all of A Terminal? So I started trolling the other terminals. (On the way, I got to ride one of those moving sidewalk things – something else to cross off my Life List.) Finally, thirty minutes and two terminals over, I found one. Ahhhhhhh. It was heavenly. It was also hilarious that when I arrived at DFW, I walked to the top of the jetbridge and saw a Dunkin’ literally at the top of my gate. (Yes, I had another coffee.)

Then, yesterday, my children illustrated yet again why we don’t travel more often. Mind you, we were in the airport for a grand total of ten minutes. My sister had already arrived, she claimed her bag as we walked up, and then the girls needed to use the restroom. On the way back to the car we were thiiiiiis close to taking the elevator. We should have. Instead, we went down the escalator because the girls think they are the Greatest Thing Ever Created. On the way down, I noticed Gracie was kind of standing on one foot, but I couldn’t really see what she was doing because she was a step or two below me and the angle was bad. I told her to keep both feet on the steps; the words had barely left my mouth when the entire escalator came to a stop. Go ahead and ask me why. If you guessed that Gracie’s ratty, old, practically-slip-on sneaker somehow got caught in the gap between the escalator treads and the wall of the railing, came off her foot and jammed the escalator – ding ding ding! You win! Thankfully, no one hurt. In fact, it took us a second to realize she had no shoe. I tried ripping the shoe out (more to avoid detection than to get it back – I wasn’t lying when I said they were old and ratty), but it was JAMMED. And probably torn in half. We were only a step or two from the bottom, so we all stepped off and tried to find someone to at least report that we broke the escalator. No one – NO ONE – was around (thankfully lessening the mortification), but a maintenance guy did happen by and took care of alerting the proper authorities. So. So far on vacation, I shut down Philadelphia, broke the Declaration of Independence (not really; it just wasn’t on display), and my kid broke the airport. Thank goodness the trip to the zoo later yesterday afternoon was uneventful!

Today we’re taking Gracie to see the Von Trapp Family Singers downtown in the fancy symphony hall. The acoustics there are renowned. Let’s hope we leave disaster at home.

Tags: airport, children, disasters, flying, vacation