How Not To Travel

For our second wedding anniversary, we went to Seattle, WA where she is from. We would spend a wonderful time there meeting her friends and family, and relaxing in downtown Seattle. Getting there, though, was a textbook case of how not to travel. A chronology of events on the outbound leg of the trip:

• Day before: I work a long 21 hours, returning home at three on the morning of travel. The kind of tiredness and brain drain is indescribable, so I plan to nap for an hour but do not hear the alarm at all. We are starting the day an hour late.
• 0500a: we shuffle through the morning, a foggy drive to the airport with poor visibility.
• 0530a: airline informs us we are too late to check in for our 6am flights. The rep, who we think doesn't quite know what she is doing, books us on a 7am flight.
• 0600a: we discover that our camera's battery is completely drained. Out goes the plan to document our trip in pictures. I return the camera and lenses to the car in long-term parking.
• 0700a: during boarding, she is pulled off the flight because her seat actually belongs to someone else. We decide that I should proceed while they try to book her on another flight.
• 1000a: her flight from COS is delayed until 3pm. I am in DEN at this time, trying to figure out how we can get back on the same flight to SEA. No chance, unless we decided to get on a 6pm flight from DEN.
• 0200p: I arrive in SEA and grab our bags. Outside of the security zone, there's nowhere to eat or chill, except for packed coffee shops. My diet all day is fluids (coffee and smoothies), not knowing there is food in our bags.
• I practically walk the entire unsecured zone of the SEA airport looking for a place to charge my phone, eat a good meal, conduct some business, and buy her flowers (the least I could do, right?).
• 0300p: her flight from COS is delayed again until 5pm because of mechanical problems.
• 0500p: she finally takes flight from COS to DEN and then on to SEA, after spending practically all day in the airports.
• 0800p: her parents pick us up from the airport and we settle into the apartment where we'll stay for a week. But there is still a problem: we are so hungry.
• 0930p: we roam downtown Seattle looking for a quick meal. It's soggy and rainy, hardly comfortable for a fancy dinner suitable for such a day. We end up in this bar, and our anniversary meal is chicken wings, fries, burgers, and beer. It's like an awkward 5th date.

That it all happened on our anniversary makes it worse. I would be pissed off too at how it all unfolded, and justifiably so. This was all my fault, a miscalculation and poor management of the day before travel (granted, some of it out of my control). Had it gone as planned, we would have arrived in SEA around 10am and had the evening to celebrate.