Flexible Travel Plans

Recently, my husband and I made plans to visit Nashville to see our kids. Our son, Guy, lives in Nashville. He is 26 years old and is pursuing a career in music, currently waiting tables to pay the bills. Our daughter, Katie, is 29, recently married to Paul, and lives in Chicago. Kt and Paul had made arrangements to be in Nashville for a few days so Paul could speak at a conference there. When you have grown kids who live in different parts of the country, when there is a chance to have them together in a visit, you do what you can to be there!!
We have a friend who works for an airline, and she has offered to let us use her buddy passes to fly, so we thought this would be a great time to try them out. We were warned that due to spring breaks, our chances would be "iffy", but we decided to be adventurous and go for it! We were up early the day of the flight and arrived at the airport in plenty of time to get our names on the list at the gate for stand-by fliers. When we went through security, we ended up landing in the increased security area. I know that we are not suspicious looking in any way shape or form, so I imagine the stand-by status was what prompted the attention. We were wanded and then the security agents proceeded to look through everything in our bags. I had an overnight bag with me as a carry-on, and the man even took out my Q-tips and looked through them! Needless to say, this took much longer than we had anticipated, so by the time we got to the gate, we were not ahead of anyone.
We sat through two flights without an opportunity to fly. Two days prior to this, the first flight had shown 5 empty seats, but by the departure date, the flight was overbooked, as was the second flight of the day. It's a small airline, so we only had the two chances to fly to Nashville a day. When we left, we were told to pick up our luggage at the baggage carousel and that this could take up to two hours.
By this time, it was 1:30 p.m. and after talking it over, we had decided to go ahead and drive to Nashville. As I said, when your adult children are going to be at the same place at the same time, it's worth some effort to be there as well!! So my husband (Rosy) went to get the car and I went to wait on the luggage. Two hours later, I went to the help desk to find out the status of the bags. The helpful woman checked her computer, then called the baggage area and spoke with the supervising employee there and we found out that our bags had flown to Nashville on the second flight. So after spending over 2 hours waiting, we took off without our luggage and left Katie a message to pick it up when she arrived in Nashville at the airport.
Then we headed out by car. We arrived in Nashville in time to go to spend an evening at an Irish Pub with the kids and listen to some excellent Irish music. The next day, we had lunch with Katie & Guy while Paul did conference things. That evening, we went to the restaurant where Guy works and had a great dinner, then met Katie and Paul at a place called The Station Inn to hear an 11 piece group that does sort of a country swing and some blues. The next day we met Katie and Paul at an old soda fountain diner for lunch, then spent a rainy afternoon at a coffee house called Cocoa's. We left there late afternoon to go to Guy's house and make homemade pizza. Our last day there ended up being the prettiest day, so we went to 21st St. and had sushi and then the guys sat at a table outside of Fido's and drank coffee and talked while Katie and I looked in the shops. We parted ways there so Katie and Paul could go to the airport and fly home and we dropped Guy off at the restaurant so he could go to work. Then we headed home.
All in all, it was well worth the drive. It was fun seeing our newlywed daughter with her new husband. It was good to see where Guy is living and where he works and talk to him face to face about what's impacting his life right now. We enjoy adult conversation with our kids and find them to be some of our favorite people to spend time with.
I'm sure that most of you without grown children living a long ways away look at that trip as an awful lot of driving for a few days of conversation. But I know that those of you with grown children living miles apart know how important it was to us to see our kids, if even for a short time. Life is short and you can miss out on the best things in life by not taking the time or making the effort or spending the money. I don't want to be one of those people who look back on their lives and wonder why they have so few memories of fun with those closest to their hearts.