Elke's Blog

My grandparents are snowbirds, meaning they rent a place in Florida to get away from the snow for 4 months (if only I could do that!). They offered their spare bedroom to me and a friend - PERFECT! Grandma's pies and the beach out our front door!

After frantically packing on Saturday night, I wasn't quite totally awake when we arrived at the airport at 5:45am for a 7:00am flight. We checked out bags, grabbed some much needed caffeine and headed to the plane.

When we arrived in Dallas, TX, for our connecting flight, we learned that we along with 5 or so other passengers had been kicked off for overbooking and weather weight restrictions. In my opinion, mid-March is not the time to be overbooking flights to Florida. Apparently they thought all of us college kids on Spring Break would not show up for the flight...

They booked us into a hotel for the evening along with $15 in food vouchers (to last us three meals and they could only be redeemed at the airport). So here we were - at a hotel not even in Dallas but Irving near the airport, with no luggage, $15 to last us 3 meals and nothing near us except vacant parking lots and a gas station about a 10 minute walk away. Not the beach that I had been dreaming about for 2 months.

We finally arrived at my grandparents' place on the beach at 11:00pm the next night... leaving us 2 1/2 days on the beach before we both had to get back to campus to work the weekend shifts.

It definitely was not the spring break that I had planned. But it was better than being here - although I hear it got up to 69 degrees so maybe I should have just saved my money. Those 2 1/2 days were relaxing as promised, and if nothing else I've got a good story now.

Best of all, it was one week without midterms!