Yesterday was a bit of a stressful day, so my hubby is going to do a guest post on here to tell y'all about it. Ugh!
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Yesterday was supposed to be our ideal travel day. Departure just after noon, arrival early evening. No early departure, no late arrival, short lay-over in Detroit - what more could one ask for?
Of course, we had had the previous day's chaos of discovering that our passports expired earlier than the normal 5 years (thank you, Official Travel!). In my desperate attempts to determine how to best salvage our vacation, I read on the US Customs and Borders website that children under the age of 16 only needed birth certificates to travel. So armed with my freshly-minted passport and our kids' birth certificates, our friend Kevin dropped us off at the airport for our flight to Las Vegas.
When we went to check-in, the Delta Airlines agent informed us that we could not board the plane. Excuse me? He even called Customs and Borders and they said no. So I went over to a phone and talked to them too. When I told him what I read on their website he told me that he had not looked at their website recently, he neither knew nor cared what it said, but that he was telling me what I needed to know. I could drive across the border with the documents I had, I could fly domestically within the US with what I had, but I could not board the plane and fly to the United States. I am still not sure exactly how the US border was secured yesterday (since here I am, writing from within the US, having/lacking the same documents I had before), but at the very least my unpleasant conversation with a less than polite bureaucrat gave me the plan that we took.
I called Delta, and after paying more for the ticket change than I paid for the original tickets (not to mention the per ticket re-issuing fee...), had our Ottawa-Las Vegas tickets changed for Syracuse-Las Vegas tickets. We called Laura, asked her and Kevin to come back to the airport and made a run for the (not quite as secure) border.
After driving 130 kilometers to the Thousand Islands crossing, we exited the 401 and smacked right into what we would later discover was a 3 hour traffic jam covering the 5 kilometers between the exit and the US border. After taking 20 minutes to get to a U-turn opening, we backtracked 40 minutes to finally cross into the US at Ogdensburg - an uneventful crossing only worth mentioning because Gavin's expired passport was the document that let us enter, as it (along with Teague's valid one) proved that our 'made in Taiwan' boys were, in fact, Canadian citizens. What keeps you out at one border is what you need to get in at another. Irony abounds...
After backtracking on the south side of the river (on a much slower road) to the I-81, we finally made our way to Syracuse, not with the two hours to spare but with just enough time to check in and board the plane. Our 12:30 departure was now a 6:17 departure, and rather than flying to Detroit (which is actually in the right direction) we made our way down to the South and had a stop in Atlanta, Georgia. We were finally able to feed our children (we filled the van with gas after we left the airport in Ottawa and grabbed a dozen donuts - that was it for our kids from 8 AM until almost 9 PM) before getting on our final flight to Las Vegas.
To top things off, we sat on the tarmac for 20 minutes before being able to de-board in Vegas (we actually had the same thing happen in Atlanta), but finally made our way to baggage claim where we were met by Gramma and Grampa Blue Eyes. 24 hours and thousands of dollars later (we'll see if our travel insurance will cover any of that - but if not there goes next year's vacation, so family and friends, we'll have a bed ready for you when you come visit Ottawa!) we finally stumbled into bed.
Despite the frustrations and the very long day, our kids again proved themselves to be travelling troops, with hardly a moan, a groan, or a cry during the entire ordeal. And Jen and I found we were able to smile and laugh at the insanity of our day.
