This trip home was 99% rare! 😱
Boy, am I glad I'm alive to write this!
We typically have good karma on our trips because we put out good karma. I’m definitely not saying that everything always goes the way we’d prefer, but when it doesn’t we are good about rolling with it.
We woke up on our last day in Puerto Rico knowing that it was going to be a long one. Our flight had been rescheduled a month earlier and instead of arriving back in Atlanta at 8 pm, with a three-hour drive home, it wasn’t leaving Puerto Rico until 8 pm.
Our bedtime, even when on vacation, can be 8 pm.
During breakfast, we literally said a little prayer to the positive karma goddess asking her for safe and easy travels.
She didn’t hear us. Maybe she was on vacation.
What happened next was the WTF of all WTFs!!!!
It started with our flight being delayed until 9:30 PM. We flew Frontier so that meant no legroom, no leaning the seat back, and no sleeping.
We arrived in Atlanta so late that the airport trains were shut down so we walked, walked, and walked some more to the baggage area.
We finally got our bag and shuttled back to our car. As soon as we got on the highway it started raining and we came to a sudden stop because of an accident.
The wreck finally got cleared and we made about ten miles of progress when we were suddenly blinded by a really bright light coming at us. It was so bright we couldn’t see and so we started getting over to another lane. It was another wreck and a person was running across the highway. The light was the wrecker’s headlights, and we nearly hit the person.
We were super shaken and thought — was all of this trying to tell us something!? Should we just find a hotel?
But, we were determined to make it home. Still raining, still dark, and very tired we decided to stop at a 24-hour McDonald’s to get caffeine and a snack.
McDonald’s are liars. They close. We went to two different locations and apparently, they close from around 3:30 am-4:00 am to do a switchover. I wish I never needed to know that.
We finally got caffeinated at our third McDonald’s stop at 4:15 AM.
The grand finale was when thick fog wrapped us up like a bow and we inched the last three remaining, feel-like-an-eternity miles to our house.
We made it home safely at 5:30 am after 23 waking hours.
What a rare WTF shitstorm!
Did it all happen to test our patience? Were the roadblocks thrown repeatedly in our way to tell us to stop and get a hotel because it wasn’t safe to drive? Did it happen to test our ability to stay awake for so long?
I teach clients how to listen to their gut because we weren’t taught how to do that. We override it as a rule and stay up in our heads overthinking and analyzing. It’s what gets us in trouble all. the. time.
I’m good at distinguishing gut feelings from head bangings in regular life circumstances but if a client came to me with a story like this and wanted help figuring it out I think I would simply smile and ask if they wanted to hear about the time I came back from vacationing in Puerto Rico.
Sometimes life is just a WTF :)