Wedding in Idaho! Yippee!

Well, this weekend was pretty superb, with one major set back, but I'll get to that later. I had the honor to fly into Idaho Falls (that's in southern Idaho, everyone, in the desert!) to fly to visit my wonderful friend, Kelly, and watch her get married to Nathan! I was also the maid of honor, what's up?! Good thing I had practice at my sister's wedding in January.

Let me tell you, the change in weather felt so great. Southern Idaho is super, super dry, and often has a breeze. It felt amazing to be able to stand outside in 80-ish degrees and not start sweating bullets! The breeze felt good, the dry air felt good! I did  have a hard time breathing for a few minutes when I first got off the plane, I'm totally not used to breathing just air and no water. But don't worry, I quickly adjusted and thoroughly enjoyed it :) I did, however, drink about 8 glasses of water within a night to keep my throat moist.  My throat never suffers from that in Mississippi :)

I first arrived in Idaho on Thursday after a 12 hour trip via driving and two flights, that started at 1:30 am. It sucked, but somehow I managed to stay up the whole day. When Kelly and I went to sleep (outside in a tent! Yay!) I had been up for 24 hours. Needless to say, I slept like a baby that night. I'm not sure if it's because I was so tired, or because I was sleeping outside in the cold desert air and it felt so good to be cold again.

Anyways, the wedding went off without a hitch. The wedding took place in Kelly's gorgeous backyard. One of my favorite flowers, sunflowers, were in full bloom

These were the only two sunflowers that were even facing me. Sad day. But they're pretty good pictures, if I do say so myself.

The cake was really pretty, too, one of her friends made it. It tasted delicious as well. If you have never had strawberry cake, you totally should.

Kelly wore a kitty brooch on her waist. ISN'T IT CUTE?!

The happy couple! When I first met Kelly back in college, if you had told me she would EVER wear a dress, I would have laughed at you.

So congrats to Kelly and Nathan! Have many happy NFL seasons!

My return trip home was a horrible way to end such a wonderful weekend. I was up at 4:20 to catch a 6 am flight. 4:20 is no big deal to me, I'm constantly waking up that early to go to work, so I was raring to go. My flight arrived at Denver at 7:30 am, and my connecting flight to Memphis was scheduled to depart at 10:04 am, but when I arrived it was delayed until 10:30 am. No big deal, gives me time to chill, grab some breakfast at Starbucks, and watch the airplanes take off, as well as look at the distant mountains, since it might be awhile until I see those again.

When 10:30 was drawing nearer, we were informed out plane needed "more maintenance," so our flight is delayed until 11:15. Annoying, but do-able, not too out of the way. 11:15 became 12pm, then 12:20, then 12:30, then 12:40. The story changed from "the plane needs maintenance" to "the plane that's inbound need maintenance." They might have actually been the same plane, but it's suspicious when the story keeps changing.

 The most annoying part of this whole delay was that it only kept being bumped back about a half hour, so you couldn't really go and do anything. If there had been a definite "flight is delayed 4 hours," I would have had time to grab lunch, hang out in the USO, or whatever. But when it only gets bumped back every half hour, you have to stay, because maybe this time will be the true time. I managed to grab a quick lunch of fruit and another coffee at Starbucks, but most of my time was at the gate. Which, by the way, changed 5 times.

By about 1 pm, the story then changed, "the plane is on it's way to the gate!" Yay! Well, forty five minutes later, there is no plane. So our plane disappeared. So we had to wait for an inbound plane.

We finally boarded a plane at 3 pm, 5 hours late. We were all so excited! The flight started off rough, though, with insane turbulence that was making me nervous, but it eventually calmed down and I was able to continue to read. Until my seat neighbor decided to sit some of her body on me when she shifted over to sleep. Hello, please don't take over my seat. If you're in my seat enough that if I had to get up to use the restroom, came back, and I would not be able to sit in my seat because you're using half of it, that's not ok. Especially since it was already hot on the airplane, so the extra body weight leaning on me was making me very uncomfortable.

I was so excited when we came in to land. Just as we were about to land though, the landing gear went back up, the engines powered up, and we were in a quick banked turn going back up. What the heck is going on?! The passengers and I started freaking out. We were finally in Memphis and now we aborted a landing and are circling the airport! What could possibly be going wrong now? My brain started running through scenarios, since being married to a pilot, I unfortunately hear stories all the time about emergencies and go arounds. Needless to say, I was panicking. As it turned out, the pilot had to abort the landing because we were in the way of a plane taking off. Whether that's the other plane's pilot's fault, or ATC, I don't know, but holy cow, that was scary. And I definitely had plenty of time to dwell on that on my 3 hour drive down to Columbus.

I finally rolled into Columbus at 9:30, after over 15 hours of traveling. Ugh. But I'm safe, have happy, happy memories of Idaho, and a story of a flight I'm sure I'll eventually be able to laugh at, but currently am still too busy freaking out about how we might have almost had crashed into another airplane.