Monday, January 3, 2011

From the Beginning: Christmas Eve {NYC Trip Day 1}

Kyle and I just got back from a WONDERFUL week in New York City!!! Visiting family and exploring the wonderful islands of New York! It's gonna take me a while to get all our trip posted, so please bear with me. I don't know the grand total of pictures yet, but I filled up a 2 GB card and three 4 GB cards, lol - so there's a LOT for me to go through. I'm just gonna break it up by day. And our first day... not too exciting... well let me just start from the beginning.

Our plane was to depart at 6am... so we got up nice and early since we knew there was snow on the ground. (about 6 inches) Luckily one of our wonderful friends was coming over later that day to shovel for us so we didn't have to worry about that before we left, we just shoveled a path to the garage, and were on our way (side note: we had taken Harpo to our friend's house the night before)
drive to airport

We arrived fairly early. Luckily we were flying out of the second terminal which is the less busy one, so we were able to park in covered parking at a 'value' price. It was worth the $30 difference to us to be in walking distance and in a ramp so we wouldn't come back to a snow covered car.
msp airport

We got their early enough that there was no line to check in and no line through security. Which all changed about 20 minutes after we got there. So we rested in the airport and waited to board our plane. Once we were on the plane we sat a while and watched the crew outside manage the snow.
waiting to leave the gate

Then we had to get de-iced before we took off....
getting deiced

This took a while.... I mean a while, I think we were getting de-iced for about 45 minutes. Which was really causing us to worry cuz our NYC flight left Milwaukee at 7:50. Almost everyone was needing to catch connecting flights so our worries weren't alone.

After the extensive de-icing, we were up in the air!
in air leaving msp

Of course we missed our NYC flight because we didn't land until about 8:15. We made our way to a customer service rep and she got us on another flight leaving at 4:30. This was VERY discouraging as the whole reason we got up so early and booked an early flight was to be in NYC by noon to have a whole day there.
milwaukee airport

Instead we were spending our whole day of Christmas Eve in a damn air port that didn't even have CHARGING stations! The outlets were very sparse to come by and everyone was wanting them. We ate breakfast at the only restaurant Chili's. We ate lunch again at Chili's. Luckily we each had our ipod touches to play on throughout those 8 hours. Although we had to fight for an outlet to keep them charged.

There was another NYC plane going out at 10 am... which us and many others were crowding the attendant begging to get on. It was overbooked and required 5 volunteers to get bumped until the 4:30 flight. Each volunteer got 2 free round trip tickets to anywhere AirTran flew. But at least we tried to get out of there a little earlier. At least we weren't on the 7:30 flight that was to leave to NYC as well.

After a llllooooooonnnnnnnnnggggggggg day in the Milwaukee airport terminal C we were on our way to the happening city. We arrived when it was dark. Took a taxi to my cousin's apartment on Roosevelt Island, just in time to see all the family that was over for the Christmas Eve dinner, whom all started to leave shortly after we arrived :-( but we still got a wonderful first night visit in.

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