We have a tradition in my house…it is called the Memory Jar. Inside of the clear Bormioli jar are thin slips of white computer paper. Every time something happens in our family that we want to remember we write it down and throw it in the jar. Every New Year’s Eve, my husband and I sit down together after the kids have gone to bed and we take turns reading them out loud.
My husband and I took a quick whirlwind trip to Boulder CO this past labor day weekend. I was traveling to Colorado for the weekend to capture my cousin’s intimate wedding. Thankfully my husband was with me, because the trip to get to Boulder was quite the doozy!
It all started as a totally normal trip. We drove to the Boston Logan airport to catch our flight. We had an hour layover in Philly on the way to the Denver Airport. The flight from Boston to Philadelphia was uneventful, took off on time and it was a fairly smooth and quick ride. When we landed in Philadelphia we found out that our connecting flight was delayed. This was a bit of a bummer because we were already supposed to be landing in Denver at 10:30pm (which is after midnight EST…). I kept a positive attitude though, traveling without kids solo with your husband feels like a mini vacation in itself sometimes.
We finally took off from the Philadelphia airport an hour after the scheduled departure time and everything was going great…until we saw Denver out in the distance. It was a crystal clear night. The stars were clearly visible and I remember taking a picture out of my cabin window of the Big Dipper, I had never seen it so big and clear before. Below us you could see Denver, with all of its bright shining lights in a sea of darkness. However, I was seeing intermittent flashing of lights. I couldn’t tell what it was, perhaps a light flashing on the wing of the airplane or something.
Well, it wasn’t a light flashing on the airplane, it was lightening. Right over the Denver airport. The pilot got on the loud speaker and announced that we would have to circle around for a while and hope that the lightening would stop so that air traffic control would give us the go ahead to land. After half an hour of circling, we were given the green light. We started to descend and what happened next, is only things of my nightmares. The plane felt as if it were plummeting. The worst turbulence I had ever experienced in my entire life. I felt sick to my stomach. After getting through some clouds, I suddenly felt the plane ascending again. I knew this wasn’t good. Then we heard the pilot get back on the intercom and announce that the air traffic controller pulled the worst “sike” on us and we were no longer clear to land. He also stated that we didn’t have enough fuel to just keep circling Denver so we had to go get more fuel.
…in Salt Lake City
…which is an hour away
…and an hour back.
We finally were able to land in Denver, way behind schedule at about 2am…Mountain Time. The Denver airport was asleep. Nothing was open, which brings me to my next piece of this memory jar tale.
