D.C. Bound

I follow an instagram account that posts about airline deals.  It's bad for me because it makes me want to go all the places.  In this case, I got tickets a few months ago to go to Washington DC with the whole family.  The tickets were 120 round trip.  Mike has to stay in so many hotels for work that we had free hotels too, so it felt like a no brainer to go.  Now that I am looking back on it, I can say that overall we had a good time.  It was not the easy, breezy amazing trip that Mike and I had this time last year.  We had kids.  More specifically, we had 4 kids.  One of whom is an anxious 5 year old who really likes being home and in his element.  We made it work though and we had a great time.  

Our trip started out at 2 in the morning because when I was booking the tickets, I didn't really think it through and I thought that it would be more fun to get up a little early and still have time to play when we got there in the afternoon.  I guess I forget that for a 5:45 flight, getting to the airport from Cache Valley can take some time.  We drove through a crazy snow storm and everyone was so excited that they stayed awake the whole time.  We got to the airport safely and through security (with only a few reminders that we can't talk about bombs or guns anywhere in the airport) and had plenty of time to wait and then board the plane.

The kids each had a device that was fully charged and loaded with movies and games.  I thought we were completely prepared.
The first flight was pretty short and for some reason, I don't have any pictures.
By the time we got on the second flight, the kids were hungry and tired and the novelty of an airplane had worn off.  Luckily, they all fell asleep for some or most of the flight (except Jake).

 

We got to DC at around 4:30 and got into our rental car.  That's when I discovered that I lost my credit card.  I knew that I had left it in the baggage kiosk in the SLC airport, so I hoped that someone noticed it and would turn it in without having a spending spree.  I couldn't really cancel the card because it was linked to the rental car and it was the points card linked to the hotel too.  I had my driver's license, and Mike had the other credit card to the account, so we thought we'd be fine.
Then, as we pulled up to pay for food at a drive in, we couldn't find Mike's wallet anywhere.  We knew we had it in the car, but we just couldn't find it anywhere.  We went to the hotel and took everything out of the car and we still couldn't find it.  We had a family prayer and went back out to find it.  I have been known to find lost things, so I was just sure that I would easily find it.  No luck.
We resigned ourselves to using the one debit card that we had between us and 50 dollars cash.  We weren't sure how Mike would get on the plane on the way home without ID, so we were going to have to deal with that.  As I reached in to grab Jake's sweatshirt to bring in to the hotel, there was the wallet...in the back seat, under a sweatshirt I had moved a dozen times.  So crazy.  We were really grateful, but I still wonder how it got back there.  Ghosts.
After all that excitement and the early morning, we decided just to call it a night.  We went to bed early and made plans for the next day.