We have successfully made it to Seattle!

It wasn’t the most pleasant trip we’ve endured, but we made it with all of our luggage still present. We stumbled into our hotel at midnight Pacific Time last night after 12 hours of traveling (for those of you who don’t want to do the math, that’s 3 AM Eastern), and promptly dropped everything and hopped in bed. Along the way we’d gotten to experience Indianapolis airport food (Tiny portions! And expensive!), Frontier Airlines customer service (“It’s a Whole New Animal!” Over and over again, repeated every time the pilot, flight attendant, or customer service agent finished an announcement), Frontier in-flight service (warm chocolate-chip cookies), dashing through the Denver airport to reach a connecting flight that was taking off in 10 minutes (From gate A59 to A60. It wasn’t quite the sprint we’d envisioned), Denver Airport Security (removing the girl from our plane who was tripping on drugs at the time), and the joys of trying to lug 150 pounds of equipment through an airport.

That last bit was made particularly difficult thanks to the Fort Wayne Eddie Bauer store; they’d threaded the backpack straps of our duffel bag the wrong way, which meant that instead of acting like a gargantuan backpack, it acted like a gargantuan sack of potatoes that kept trying to leap off my back, and when that wasn’t successful, settled for trying to rip my shoulders off. Thankfully I noticed that upon inspection at the hotel, so we shouldn’t have the same issue again.

Since then we’ve slept for 10 hours, had a nice brunch with some of Seattle’s famous coffee, and now we’re just lounging around before we pick up our rental car and start trying to assemble all of our equipment. For me, that means some reading and catching up on the Tour de France. Libby, meanwhile, is enjoying her favorite pastime.