Key West

When Cal was home the first week of July, I helped him book a flight to southern Florida so that he could visit Hannah-Marie in Key West.  Little did we know at the time that the easiest part of planning his trip would be that flight.  His plane landed in Miami, but he would still need to get a flight to the small Key West airport.  Cal and I both researched flight prices and it would have been more than his entire trip from Chicago to Miami and back.  Then we tried a rental car, but that was even more expensive.  Thankfully, Hannah-Marie was able to send him a link to the shuttle from the airport to Big Pine that was about half the price of a flight.  After looking at the schedule we realized that the best option for him to get to Big Pine and still have time to go to dinner or see the island on his first day would be to change his Southwest flight to one to Fort Lauderdale that departed at 6:20 a.m. and catch the shuttle there.  Once we had everything scheduled all Cal had to do was to make sure he got to the airport in time for his early morning flight.

I texted Cal last night to see if he wanted me to call him at 4 a.m. our time to make sure he was up.  Even though he planned on staying up all night, he accepted the offer just in case he needed a wake up call.  Unlike Cal, I did sleep for a couple of hours between midnight and four.  I heard from him a few minutes after my alarm went off to let me know that he had already arrived at the airport by Uber.  I was very glad to hear that as he had plenty of time to get through security and to his terminal well before the plane boarded.  I stayed up and checked on him multiple times.  When he first arrived he was one of only ten people in the baggage check in area.  He boarded right at 5:50 a.m. central time and the plane took off without a hitch.  

As I only got a couple of hours of sleep last night, normally I would have gone back to bed this morning.  Cameron had to be up at 8 a.m. for tennis camp, however, so I decided to stay up until I knew he made it there.  I told him later that as soon as I saw his phone at Bethany, I "passed out" and didn't move until my alarm went back off at 10:40 a.m. except when Cal texted me to say that he arrived at the Fort Lauderdale airport without any problems and had slept the entire flight.   I was really glad to hear that.

The only glitch that Cal had on the day was that the shuttle was 5 minutes later to the airport.  I told him that he didn't even need to panic about that as I did the entire five minutes.  He slept off and on on the shuttle as well.  Once he reached the Keys, however, he woke up and enjoyed the views for the rest of his trip.  He arrived at Big Pine around 5:30 which gave he and Hannah-Marie plenty of time to get dinner and try at few bars at Key West.  He said that it was absolutely beautiful.  The Keys have been on my vacation to-do list for quite some time.  For now I was just happy to enjoy it through Cal's texts instead.