Cape Cod to San Francisco in 15 hours

Today was a cross-country travel day. I don’t mean running through the countryside, I mean flying form the East Coast to the West Coast. We got up at 6, had breakfast and finished last-minute preparations. We left at 8:15 and drove to the airport in Providence, R.I., which took until about 10 a.m. We checked four bags and went through security and got aboard out first flight at 11:30. We landed in Chicago at 1:15, although my watch was still on Eastern Time so it seemed like 2:15 to me. We had arranged for a wheelchair for Mom. She is able to walk, but not the long distances involved in going from one terminal in Chicago to another. So a very nice woman wheeled her to approximately the right area and left us off in a room called “Special Services.” It is reserved for people needing special assistance. We hung out there for a while and had lunch frMcDonald'slds and a cheesecake stand. We had a couple hours to kill, so we just watched people waiting for the next flight, from Chicago to San Francisco.

Finally we took off from Chicago about 5:30, stopped in Las Vegas, and continued on to San Francisco. The scenery of the desert in Nevada was amazing. It looked like we were landing on the Moon. And it was so surprising to see the city of Las Vegas appear so suddenly out of the arid landscape. When we got to San Francisco about 9:30, we had been traveling for more than 15 hours. Fortunately the return trip will have better connections. Barbara’s brother Ed, and his family met us at the airport and (after a delay of about an hour locating our bags – which had come on an earlier flight – we got to our hotel. Whew!