Vacation - First Class Bad Luck Getting Home

We had a bit of first class bad luck when it came to getting home. Since our flight left at 6am we decide to spend the night at the Hilton Garden Inn at the airport. We had fun that evening eating breakfast for dinner at Cracker Barrel (which is always a good idea) and swimming in the hotel's pool.

We had to get up super early to return the rental car and get through security and stuff on time. So I called the front desk for a wake up call and set the hotel's alarm clock. I thought two alarms would make us doubly sure to get up on time.

I was wrong.

The wake up call never came and the alarm clock didn't go off. We woke up 45 minutes before our flight left; needless to say, we missed the flight. I was pretty ticked off when I called down to the front desk to let them know what happened. But by the time we had packed and loaded the car (no time for showers - ick!), I had calmed down a bit and was civil to the front desk employees. I was quite firm in letting the manager know that I held the hotel entirely responsible for what happened and that they needed to find a way for us to get home. I think they were surprised that I wasn't more rude or upset - they even thanked me several times for being so nice! My feeling is, as long as they were willing to make amends, no need to get mad and rude. You can catch more flies with honey than with vinegar.

This worked - they ended up buying us three new tickets home. (Since we had gotten our tickets through Priceline we couldn't transfer flights or get any sort of refund. ) Not only that, but since all of the flights that day were overbooked, we got to fly first class. Way nice. ($1900 nice!)

We had to wait three hours at the airport for our flight, but the boys were pretty well behaved considering how long they had been up and how long we had to wait. Josh threw up on Lance when he choked on a Cheerio, but other than that it was pretty uneventful. We flew into Detroit and had an hour and a half layover. We entertained Spencer there with riding the tram and the moving walkways and eating M&Ms. Josh was entertained with bottles, Cheerios, and watching the planes out the windows. Both boys had leaky diapers, but luckily I had packed extra clothes. (A bit of good luck!)


I have to admit that I felt a bit out of place in first class; we hadn't showered that morning and had two young children. Not exactly looking our best! But it was nice to be a little pampered - a glass for our sodas (instead of plastic) and as many fancy snacks as we wanted. Oh la la. Not worth all the extra money, unless someone else is paying for it! Oh, and on the flight from Detroit to Indie there was an extra seat next to me, so Josh got his own seat. Now that's first class!