20 hours

20 hours. That's how long it took us to get home on Monday. We left Marc's parents house at 6:15 in the morning, got through security with relatively no problems, then sat and waited in the airport. Apparently, there is a new rule that the flight crews have to have so many hours between flights as a mandatory rest period kind of thing. Since they came in late the night before, we had to wait for them to reach their eligibility time to fly. Flight crew finally showed up, we were loaded on the plane, and waited......for more than an hour to get a mechanical issue taken care of. The flight attendants said we'd be cutting our connection times close, but the other flights were aware that we were being delayed. We were towards the end of the plane, and being the frugal people we are, had the maximum allowance of carry-on-bags so we didn't have to pay the $25 per bag to check them below. We got all the stuff off the plane and booked it across the Chicago airport. We were in terminal C and had to get to terminal B, Marc thinks it was almost a mile that we had to cover to get to the next gate. Lexi was on my back in a backpack, we had our rolly carry-ons, booster seats for the boys, a garment bag with the dress clothes in it, more back packs, & the boys were wearing backpacks, and they ran with us the entire way. I was so proud of them!! We finally reached the gate to catch our plane to Boise, and the doors were shut. The people working at the gate told us that it was closed, even though the plane was STILL THERE!! They were most unhelpful, totally unwilling to help us and kept passing us off to the customer service desk telling us that we had already been re-booked on another flight. What is even more frustrating is that the plane still sat there for 15 more minutes!! And there was 10 other people from our Cincinnati flight trying to get on the Boise flight.

We had three options, 1) take a 3:30 flight to San Francisco, then a flight to Boise getting in at about 10:30 that we had confirmed seats on 2) wait as standby passengers for a direct flight to Boise leaving at 7:00 that night arriving in Boise about 11:00, or 3) get a confirmed flight out the next morning and the airlines would put us up in a hotel that night. All 3 were lousy options. I would have loved to have taken option 3 and seen a little bit of Chicago, but we couldn't miss another entire day of work for Marc, and get to do the same thing in the morning. So we nixed staying the night. We also didn't want to risk flying all of us standby, especially since it was the last flight of the day to Boise, so we were forced to fly to San Francisco, with 5.5 hours to kill in the Chicago airport with 3 little kids and a butt load of luggage. I had Marc go back to the customer service desk to get us Meal Vouchers, and we were given $60 to get food anywhere in the airport. We found a kids area for the boys to run in and Lexi enjoyed crawling after them and going up and down the stairs. We watched a movie, tried unsuccessfully to get the baby to take a nap, ate dinner at Chilis, and sat around doing nothing.

Finally, we got to get on an airplane and traveled on-time to San Francisco. Lexi slept half of the flight, and the boys slept for a while too. We got to watch the "Blind Side" which Marc & I both really enjoyed. We landed, found another place for the boys to play, took our own sweet time getting to the gate (1.5 hour layover before the flight to Boise was supposed to take off).....and of course the flight to Boise was delayed ANOTHER HOUR. We were so done by then. Oh my goodness, it was all we could do to try and stay level-headed and not get too obnoxious about our frustrations and anger with United airlines. We loaded a very tiny plane to go to Boise, were delayed SOME MORE for a small maintenance issue, then finally took off as all 3 of our kids passed out asleep. We had to wake up the boys when we landed and carried them through the airport. Since the last flight was so small, they checked the larger carry-on items below the plane and we had to collect them at baggage claim. Yay. My dad was there to pick us up, bless his heart it was midnight Boise time (2:00 in the morning Cincinnati time).

Wow. We have never had such a horrible time with flight delays and extra long layovers. United has PATHETIC customer service. If they had waited 2 or 3 minutes for the passengers from Cincinnati to get to the Boise flight, that would have been 10 passengers that they wouldn't have had to deal with. The plane was still there for heavens sake!!!! And they were so nasty about it. My kids were amazing. They endured it all with us with no major meltdowns, they were so good on the planes, and there only complaint was that they wanted to get on a plane that would take them to Boise. Tyler just didn't understand why there were so many airplanes at airport and they wouldn't take him home. Poor guy. I felt the same way too. Its taken us a couple of days to recover. We're still dragging, and both Marc & I are still sore from hauling all the stuff with us on our backs. I'm not looking forward to October when we're flying to Florida for Marc's brothers wedding.....I wish there was a better alternative than driving.