So it’s Official

By: Samantha S. Daviss

So for the past three and a half years I have been sharing our family’s funny antics when it comes to our travel adventures. And all this time I kept blaming the chaos on our three boys. Not because they are bad kids or difficult to travel with, but just because of two obvious factors…one, there are three of them and one of me (most of the time travelling alone with them to meet our daddy); and two, they are boys…need I say more?

But over the holiday weekend I managed to align my stars, Congress must have passed a bill allowing it to happen, and I have the best support team with my husband and my parents…say it ain’t so, I was able to take a girls’ weekend getaway. Just myself and one of my closes girlfriends of 22 years. She and I were roommates at school one summer in New England, and she grew up in Vienna, Austria. So the likelihood that a small town Texas girl, and a German-speaking Viennese waltzing Austrian girl would stay friends all these years was almost near impossible. But by the grace of God we have made it happen. We stay in touch via the phone almost every week, and now that she is living in California, we try to see each other once a year, once every other year.

But we were off to a great weekend getaway together, just us, no stress, just wine, and a whole lot of girl talk ahead of us. So my flight was fairly early Friday morning; I had to leave the house by 4 a.m. to get to the airport on time. With that in mind I decided to go ahead and put my bags in the car the night before. That morning I snuck out to get my makeup bag out of the back, and left the glass portion up on the tailgate of my SUV. Not a big deal, I knew it was open, in fact I was headed back to put my makeup case back in my bag, and on the way I hit the garage door opener, with full intention behind my actions.

Everything was going great, right up until the last moment, the garage door has a curved piece of metal that sticks out that rests on the garage flooring; well that piece caught my glass lift gate and completely ripped it off its hinges. Oh I know what you are thinking…no way that happened, or maybe it just bent the window up a little bit…well you couldn’t be further from the truth. It ripped the window completely off the hinges, off the hydraulics, and shattered the entire window on me. It cut my hand up, it put a couple shards of glass into my head, and one even landed in my mouth, and quite a few down my shirt.

It has to have been the loudest most horrifying sound I have ever heard in my entire life. I slowly walked back inside trembling with blood dripping off of me. My poor husband thought I had been held up in the garage, but no he just decided to marry the most uncoordinated, non-graceful woman on the planet.

After he calmed me down he put me in the truck and sent me off to the airport. I made it, but with all the hiccups that morning I was late, of course. My bag was considered a “late check”; and I headed off down the new corridor of Love Field (if you haven’t been, you should go, it’s gorgeous), but just remember that gates 42, 43, and 44 are not in the newly renovated terminal…trust me I know. 

Because I went to the new terminal area, and gate 42 was all the way back in the old terminal…so of course I ran, and sweated, and ran some more, while all the Band-Aids from all the cuts from my broken window flew off my hand, and continued to bleed even more from my increased heart rate from running down the terminal the wrong way.

My trip is starting to sound a bit like The Very Hungry Caterpillar, isn’t it? On Monday he ate through one apple, on Tuesday he ate through two pears, and so on. At 4a.m. she shattered her windshield, at 5a.m. she hoped she would make her flight, and at 6 a.m. she bleed profusely all over Love Field airport.

Well once I found my seat on the airplane, and the very perplexed and concerned flight attendant realized that I wasn’t a literal “flight risk” with all my bandages all over my hands; my girls’ weekend finally commenced.

So you see, it doesn’t take a rocket scientist for me to figure out what the common denominator is in all of our travel debacles, and I must say it is looking like all roads are leading to this gal. So my solution is for my husband to drug me, put me in a wooden crate with holes in the sides, and ship me to our next destination. I am certain that will be much easier on everyone all the way around.

So remember, next time you think your trip is going rough…just think of me. Happy travels y’all.