Day 1 - Journey to Carmel

I patiently waited by the window, like a cocker spaniel, for Amy to pick me up.  Every time I heard a noise I thought it was her and if I had a tail I would have wagged it.  Finally she arrived.  Poor girl hadn’t gone to the bathroom all day trying to get as much work done as possible before she left.  Bathroom break over, car packed up and we are on the Road Again.  That song stayed in my head until we got to Milwaukee.  We planned on making a quick stop to pick up Pad Thai at our favorite restaurant before we checked in to the La Qinta for the night.  Our trusty GPS (Cynthia) took us directly to the restaurant which we would have never found in the dark on our own.  As we were getting close to the restaurant, we both had the brilliant idea that we should have called ahead and placed a pickup order.  Phone number for the restaurant is now in our contacts on our cell phones.  We arrived at the restaurant, placed our order, they tell us 20 minutes, we sit down, Amy takes off her work shoes (she didn’t even take time to change into vacation clothes) and suddenly they give us our order.  Apparently 20 minutes in Thai translates to 3 minutes in America.   With the hot Pad Thai burning my thighs (say that fast 5 times) we are back on the road and Cynthia (GPS) is guiding us to our hotel.  Again, we would have never found our hotel in the dark with all the construction without our trusty GPS.  We check in and then enjoy the best Pad Thai in the world.  Good times!!

Saturday morning starts very early at 4:45 am.  We both have left over Pad Thai for breakfast J  Shuttle soon arrives and we are off to the airport.  We quickly checked in and made it through security.  Our flight time had changed from 7:20 am to 7:45 am – bit concerning because we have a very short layover in Memphis. We arrive in Memphis, find the gate information for our flight to LA, head to the gate and as we get there they are beginning to board.  No time for a bathroom break or to pick up a soda for the flight.  We luck out on the flight, Amy is alone in a row of three seats so I scoot over and we have plenty of room during the flight.  Without my carryon under the seat in front of me I am able to stretch out my legs.  Yippee!!!  I had brought my left over Pad Thai with me.  It hadn’t been refrigerated overnight but I just couldn’t leave my leftovers behind.  I had them for lunch on the plane and they were wonderful even if I get food poisoning.   We land in LA and have a long layover (3 ½ hours).  As we are searching for somewhere to eat lunch we run into a former co-worker Kay Schuster.  She and her family are on their way to Kona.  Amy and I decide that we have to buy a lottery ticket – the stars seem to be aligned in our favor on this trip.  We have to take a shuttle to our gate and they actually take us on the tarmac and we are passing planes and then we have to stop at a stop sign to let a large United jet taxi to the runway.  We arrive at our gate, get our seat assignments and wait for the little puddle jumper plane that will take us to Monterey.  The minutes drag on but fortunately we have Crabby Patties to eat and plenty of reading material.  Finally they announce our flight.  We have bulkhead seats so we can’t keep our carry-ons with us, we have to stow them several seats behind us.  Fortunately the flight is only 42 minutes.  We land in Monterey and our luck continues.  My luggage made it – I was concerned it wouldn’t given the short time between flights in Memphis.  Because we are a little early our rental car isn’t ready so they upgrade us to a lovely red SUV.  We are quickly on the road and heading to Carmel with the help of our GPS.  We head straight to Safeway to pick up necessities for the first night – beer, cookies, wood and smore fixins.  Back on the road we quickly arrive at the most fabulous cabin in the world.  It is exactly as we remember it.  We unpack and start a fire.  Now that we have kindling, it works much better than last trip.  Fire blazing, we make smores and down a few beers.  Wonderfully content, we head off for our beds. Day 1 of our trip comes to an end.