Once a year, my friend Nathalie and I take my girls on a travel weekend. Fifteen years in the making, this year we decided to check out San Antonio, Texas; bringing along my niece for good measure 🙂
To say that our trip started out smoothly is a gross understatement. Our flight delayed by 2.5 hours in Ottawa due to weather, we missed our connecting flight in Toronto to Austin. We made it to Toronto, re-routed to Houston, only to sit on the tarmac for 3 hours before take-off. Because we had a rental car waiting in Austin (a Jeep Cherokee which the girls were pretty pumped about!), we had to make new arrangements in Houston which put us in a mini-van (sad face, broken heart.) Arriving in Houston at 2:30 a.m., the fog was so dense that a 3 hour drive to San Antonio was not deemed safe and we had to rent a hotel room for the remainder of the night.
These circumstances could have set off our trip; tainting the rest of our long weekend. But they didn’t. Fortunately, both Nat and I have adopted the mantra that “it is what it is, and we have no option but to deal with it.” Which we did, sometimes having to politely advocate for ourselves, we found numerous points of laughter, and we focused on the bright side….hey, it’s a great adventure to add to our story!
And, as usual, we had a silver lining to the cloud. Arriving at the Houston airport, the rental car agency had no mini-vans (darn!). Assuming we would get an equivalent SUV, how delighted we were to walk over to the parking lot to discover she had upgraded us to a cherry red, Dodge Charger! Needless to say we had some pretty excited girls at 3 am in the morning!
Overall, we had a great trip; good memories made and new experiences to add to our adventures.
The moral of the story: your attitude counts. You can make it work for or against you; the choice ultimately is yours 🙂
Photo credit: Me!
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great stuff, never getting frustrated and staying in the holiday spirit
Thanks Brian!!
What a wonderful story, it does add to the adventure. Imagine a state like Texas having too much fog. I can offer testimony that supports the whole roll with it attitude, which I truly believe fits with your earlier post of Desiderata. My partner and I travelled to Jamaica early in our travel experience. Low and behold when we went to check in at the resort there was no record of us, and nothing booked. This was an all inclusive! Being naive travellers, and Canadian we simply sat down in the lobby enjoying our complimentary arrival drinks, believing that the staff would sort this out and let us know when they had done so. The couple with us were seasoned, perhaps cynical travellers and were getting ready to launch protest. They had just noted that we were quite relaxed when the staff arrived and installed us in the owners villa. Hence we had private pool, private grounds, a housekeeper, groundkeeper and all of the resort amenities. Our friends couldn’t get over it. No wailing, no knashing of teeth, simply a trust that most things work out as they should.
What an absolute great story! Thanks for sharing this Gurlie; I loved it!