Day 5: We were in horrible pain all over our bodies except apparently we missed a spot. Don’t worry. We took care of it through biking 25 miles. We toured the San Francisco Bay. We crossed over the Golden Gate Bridge, where I almost killed, or shoved over the side, many pedestrians. Side note: bikes and pedestrians in a small confined space all moving in alternating directions is a recipe for disaster! As soon as we got off of the bridge the chain on my bike somehow fell off:-/ Luckily I had the mechanically inclined and mega talented Sarah Pelham with me. We took winding roads down into the beautiful town of Sausalito, (almost got hit by a few cars.) Had lunch and enjoyed a glass of wine at the most beautiful restaurant with an amazing view of San Francisco on the other side of the Bay. We shopped and then went back to find our bikes… that bike parking area was here somewhere… and did I mention that the 1,000 or so bikes inhabiting the area were all exactly the same:-/? After finally locating our bikes, we jumped on a ferry. We had left at noon and it was now nearing 8:00pm. Bikes needed to be returned by 9:00. While on the ferry we got to see Alcatraz. Very creepy place. We decided before returning our bikes we needed to stop down at our new favorite hangout Pier 39. The ferry was going to drop us off at Pier 1:-(. This was where we discovered our new painful location. Our rear ends were horribly bruised:-( Our friend Cathy was going to meet us at Pier 39 for one last get together so we needed to move quickly across town. We made it there at 8:45pm. The bike place was still pretty far away so Sarah called to let them know we would be late. They were ok with that and told us where their super creepy garage was and gave us the codes to open up the 2 sets of double doors. So now we had all the time in the world:-) except for returning our bikes, checking into our new hotel, packing for the plane, getting a shuttle to the airport and making our 6:00am flight:-/ At this point we needed to do everything we hadn’t done on the pier which was have ice cream and then go get donuts. I had ice cream first, then we went and I kid you not, bought a bucket of donuts. Don’t judge us. They were hot and freshly made:-) We then realized at about 9:15pm that we hadn’t actually had dinner so we had tomato soup in a bread bowl. While each individual item was quite tasty, together they were a train wreck!:-p We sadly said goodbye to Cathy and set off to find the creepy garage. We may or may not have wandered into a deserted alley or 2 but eventually/accidentally found our way there. A piece of traveling advice, the scary homeless people are very good at directions:-) We entered the 2 sets of double doors and returned our bikes. Very freaky. Then we set off to find our hotel. It was on that one street… Oh we will find it. After touring the city we found our hotel. This is when things went downhill. We checked in, retrieved our luggage from the holding room, and then asked the very nice, and apparently very stupid, desk clerk if she would please reserve a shuttle for us in at this point, 5 hours. She asked for our boarding passes, wrote down all of our flight information, and then called the shuttle company. We were all set. We had a wake up call for 3:30am, a shuttle pick up at 4:00am, and a flight at 6:00am. The airport was only 15 minutes away the clerk said because it was so early we would make record time. We were so smart and prepared!:-) We packed, and went to bed around 12:30am.
Day #6 We got up with the wake up call and everything went as planned. Our 97:-/ year old shuttle driver picked us up a few minutes early so we were super on top of things… He topped out at about 25 miles an hour and had to pick people up from 4 other locations. By the time we got to the last pick up it was 4:50am! I said, How far is the airport from here?” He said, “16 miles.” :-/ Then I said, “How long does it take you to get there?” He said, “6-12 minutes.” ????? I looked at Sarah because I thought perhaps my math skills were a little off due to fatigue but unless this man was driving a rocket ship, I had no idea how he would make it in that amount of time. He finally, slowly pulled into the WRONG airport!!! I pointed this out a little loudly and he said, “Ma’am our company doesn’t go to that airport. Let me drop these people off and we will sort this out. You apparently told them the wrong airport.” I said in a frantic, rather loud voice, “We didn’t tell anyone anything they took the information off of our boarding passes. How do we get there, a taxi? Will you take us?” “No ma’am, a taxi would cost you over $100 and I’m not allowed to take you. You just need to calm down and I will make a call and figure out what happened.” In my head, “I want to punch your teeth down your throat and rip out your tongue!” Out loud, nothing. Sarah and I grabbed our luggage and started to run towards taxis. He yelled to us to take the subway. It would be faster. Me in my head, “I would love to drag you behind a pick up truck over shards of glass!” Out loud, nothing. We were semi incoherent when we approached the taxi. We cried and babbled and the man took our luggage and then I felt like we were in a high speed chase on an episode of Cops! I loved that man. We made it to the airport at 5:43. The ride to the airport officially costed us $156:-( This includes stupid shuttle man. The Spirit airlines counter begrudgingly took our luggage and told us to run! We, by we I mean Sarah, ran as fast as we could. Only to be halted at a very long security line. We could hear our flight announcing final boarding calls. Our tears meant nothing to these angry travelers. We finally made it through, ran to our gate and were told we missed our plane by exactly 3 minutes. But don’t worry they could get us on a flight on Monday…2 days later!!!! Break down time. This was not a good time to be completely exhausted and irrational. There were several other mishaps, I left a piece of luggage when we ran through security that happened to be filled with liquids… Oops! I was supposed to check that bag. We had to be physically escorted by a security guard who carried my duffle bag as if my shampoo and hair gel would detonate at any moment. He wanted to throw them away. I did quite a bit of begging and whining to prevent that. That would have pushed me over the edge! To make a really long story still long but not ridiculously so, a very good friend of mine hooked us up with a different airlines and let us use whatever miles he had left. We were set to leave at 4:05pm. This made for an extremely long day in the airport! When we finally boarded our plane. I took the traditional 2 Xanax and immediately fell asleep. We arrived in Phoenix an hour and a half later, still pretty drugged up, we found our gate where we boarded our connecting flight right away. We decided to forgo another dose of Xanax due to the fact that we were still pretty foggy and we couldn’t figure out the time change:-/ Then the pilot announced that we had to return to the gate due to a malfunction of ¥#€£….. He said the latter part in a whispery mumbled tone so I had no idea what he said. Apparently mechanics were going to work on the plane. The pilot seemed to think that it was a computer glitch and rebooting them made everything all better. I took 2 more Xanax and don’t remember what happened next. I’m pretty sure I overdosed a little:-/ when we got to the car at 3:50am, I couldn’t drive because I was literally seeing double! Sarah had to drive and she had to stop a few times because she was so sick. We were a mess! Sooooo glad to be home! Great trip though!!!:-)