CMS Take Two: Day One

Posting this a day late (as many of my posts probably will be) because when one gets up at 4:30 a.m. to catch an airplane and one is not accustomed to doing so, things get messy and who knows what this post may have looked like last night. Actually, that might have been more fun.

If you read my Twitter, you know that when I got to the Philadelphia airport at 6:00 a.m. (compliments of the Lady Liberty shuttle - on-time and economical at ten bucks!), it was the MOST crowded I have EVER seen the airport, including during the holidays. They weren't even letting people cut the line in their flight time was approaching because that was, uh... EVERYONE. It was CRAZY.

Then, in Detroit (yes, you read that correctly, Delta routed me from Philly to Charlotte, NC, via Detroit), I got locked in the jetway. I was talking to a flight attendant about something a former friend of mine (a former flight attendant herself) had said to me once about not bringing overhead carry-ons because attendants are not obligated to help me with it. She told me this was FALSE, and gave me options for how to deal with this, since I can't reach the overhead compartments. Thus, I was, by far, the last one off the airplane. When I got to the top of the jetway, the door was closed, but as it was one of those doors with the bar across it, I assumed I'd hit the bar and keep on going. Instead, I hit the bar and smacked into the door. I knocked on the door. I banged on the door. I banged harder. I saw a button next to the door marked "EMERGENCY." I thought "No way. Not in an airport." I banged again. Someone banged back. Huh???? I banged back, back. She opened the door. It was ghost town on that side of the door. Apparently, no one was getting ready to board my plane after we de-planed. I'm glad she happened by, or I'd have missed my connection.

Then I RUN to make my connection. Man, I had NO idea just how MASSIVE the Detroit airport is. I need to go again when I have more time. They have a TRAM! Oh wait, I DO again in two weeks. And I have a three-hour layover. Yay me! (Btw, ever try to run with a heavy carryon with you have a hip with a torn cartilage?)

I get to Charlotte (sitting by the CUTEST. GUY. EVER) with no problems (except discovering that the pattern I've been working on was using "SSK" but not to mean "slip slip knit." Grr. Twenty minutes in the car with Mom and Dale, and they have a car fight. So that was exciting. Apparently, he has yet to master the art of shutting up with the GPS talks. In fact, he takes her speaking as his cue to START speaking.

We finally get to the motel to discover... we have no reservation. Despite Mom pulling out the information/rates the woman wrote down for us when we were here for us in December (that's my mom, ladies and gentlemen), despite my Mom having called last week to confirm, despite my Mom giving them alternate spellings of her last name - nope, no reservation. Cue flashbacks to last year's Race That Never Was with the endless rain and the lost keys and crying for weeks about the botched "I'm going to give my mom a Mother's Day vacation" treat..... Min mini-meltdown.

Finally, Mom keeps insisting, "Sir, this IS our confirmation number. PLEASE, just try again. PLEASE. I KNOW we have a room." And we do. It's just that we arrive tomorrow (now today). So Mom asks if we can arrive today. And we can. We each take as much as we can from the van to the room... to find that the card keys don't work. So we're assigned another room.

We go eat, we ask locals for the back route to the track (which takes about 15 minutes from our motel on a non-race day), we do a test run. While we're at the track, I say, "Hey, let's go to Hendrick while we're here!" So we do. Mom has a GREAT time going, "There's Chad" every five minutes (for those who don't know, he's a crew chief I LOVE and I refer to Jimmie Johnson as "The Guy Who Drives Chad's Car"). And Dale (who HATES Jack Roush) would say, "There's a Roush spy" every time he say someone driving a Ford.

We come back to discover I've left my camera battery charger at home. Cue Min mini-meltdown #2. (Note, this isn't helped by the whole getting-up-at-4:30 a.m.-and-travelling-on-five-hours-of-sleep thing.) After several calls, we find a Best Buy who has the Sony charger I need. We trek out to get it.

Finally, around 10:00 p.m., I climb into bed... to find that my sheets are stained with blood. It was one stain that started at the blanket and went right through to the flat sheet and the fitted sheet. Mom (bless her) changes back into clothes, goes to the front desk, and about ten minutes later, comes back with the clerk, who was PISSED (not at us, at the staff). We have a new room. So we move everything, which is a considerable amount of things - three people taking over a room for two weeks. I finally got to sleep around 11:30 p.m.

Today, we're off to the truck practices, the showdown practice, the All-Star practice, quals, and the truck race is tonight!