Monday: We Take Leave

Dear Diary,

well this morning we had our last breakfast here and it was delicious as always.  Then mom went to church while I took a nap, since she woke me up around 5:30 that morning.  She came back around 9am and we got our stuff ready to leave.  I’m always saddened when leaving a hotel room after a trip.  Our stuff ready, we hauled it out to the elevator and took it downstairs.  The front desk was nice enough to watch it while we drove to Opry Hills mall.
http://www.simon.com/mall/mall_info.aspx?ID=1259

It was a big and beautiful mall with neon signs everywhere and shiny wooden floors that reminded me of a basketball court.  As we walked around, we entered stores like Big Dogs, Yankee Candle, Nautica, and we got some nice shirts at the Disney Outlet store.  After shopping we decided to go to Aquarium to eat.  I had a coupon from opry.com for a Free Appetiser of the Day with an entree.
http://www.aquariumrestaurants.com/AquariumNashville/

Now I’m back at the hotel.  We’ve returned the car to Enterprise, stuffed even more shirts from the mall into our bags(yes, I bought 2 more shirts at Aquarium), and now I’m typing away here in the Business Center.  It’s 2:05pm and we leave for the airport at 2:45pm.

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Tuesday, June 26

Well I’m back at work now writing during my break.  Here’s the rest of what happened yesterday.

Soon after finishing about writing the above, I checked NWA’s website to see if our flight was coming in on time.  To my shock it was showing up as being cancelled.  I tried to get us booked on another flight online, but it wouldn’t let me.  We called the NWA 800 number but we just got a machine you had to talk to.  Most frustrated and confused we left with the shuttle to the airport to straighten the mess out.  As we arrived we rushed towards the NWA desk and the woman was very nice and knew about the cancellation.  She called someone on the phone and got us booked on a Non-stop Contenential flight to Cleveland which left at 5:40pm and now since we weren’t changing in Memphis, we would arrive earlier in Cleveland around 8:09pm.  Just calling my mother’s friend who was picking us up in Cleveland was another challange.  The stupid phone in the airport kept taking our money and my mother talked to several operators.  We finally tried the phone next to ours and it worked no problem.  My mom’s friend wasn’t home, but her son was.  He promised to get a hold of her to tell her of the change in time and airline.  So we headed for security.

We were then lucky enough to be one of the few people randomly chosen for extensive screening, meaning they padded us down and opened & searched our bags for any explosives and whatnot.  I didn’t mind, since I had nothing to hide and our flight didn’t leave for a while.  We headed for our gate and waited…and waited…and waited.  We still have leftovers from Aquarium so we had that for dinner.  Our flight boarded ontime and we had a pleasant flight.  The view outside was wonderful once we took off.  I felt like a Greek god returning from the "Athens of the South" to Mt Olympus.  We flew so high that the clouds looked like mountains and valleys of white.  And I love the color of sky blue, so that was nice and relaxing way to end our journey.  We landed at Cleveland-Hopkins around 8:10pm and headed for baggage claim.  I noticed our airport didn’t look as nice as Memphis or Nashville.  Our baggage was easily found, but we had to wait a while for my mother’s friend to pick us up.  We drove home and I unpacked that night, hanging up all my new shirts (my favorite being either the Bugs Bunny or the Aquarium shirt with the dolphins) and got ready to get back to work the next day.