Charlotte Latvala: Making travel plans can lead to endless days
“What time does your flight leave tomorrow?” I innocently asked my son when he was home for a week in December.
“Pretty sure it’s around 6:30.”
“In the evening?”
“In the morning. So we’ll need to leave here around….”
I put my hand up to stop him. “You don’t have to say it. The middle of the night. Why on earth did you book a flight at 6:30 a.m.?”
“You booked it, remember? You gifted me this flight with your points. And I’m pretty sure it was because it the cheapest one you could find.”
Adult children have a way of remembering these sorts of petty details. When they’re younger, you can distract kids from your goof-ups with a well-timed flourish of candy (“Well look here — I have a lollipop with your name on it!”) or Lego purchase (“Who wants to go to Toys R Us?”) As adults…they know when you’re at fault.
But I digress.
One thing no one ever tells you about having children is exactly how many hours you’ll clock as a travel agent and Uber driver once they’re out of the house.
In the past month, I’ve logged about 564 trips back and forth to the airport, and a couple to the train station.
It starts by figuring out logistics for how to get them to college. How to get them home. How to return them to school when the holidays are over.
After college, they move away. So you pour over flight schedules; you ask them when they can break away from work. (And rejoice if they have work to break away from.) You check and recheck whether their flights are on time.
You obsess over the weather, and what effect it will have on travel plans.
The other thing no one tells you? How often you’ll be setting your alarm for some ungodly hour because four months ago you decided you’d rather save $25 on a flight than book one at a reasonable time.
Although, it’s not all bad. There’s something about dropping a child off for an early morning flight or train ride that’s just plain surreal. Peaceful. Other-worldly.
The sky is the blackest black at 4 a.m. And it’s quiet. So quiet. The birds aren’t even up. The streets are, for the most part, deserted. You wonder where the few random cars are going. A doctor or nurse, headed to work? Someone sneaking back after a late night out? A lonely truck driver barreling home from a cross-country run?
When you get back to the house, everyone else is still sleeping and it’s only 5 a.m. You make yourself the first cup of tea, and it feels like the day is stretching on endlessly before you, all yours, with no one to tell you what to do or where to go.
Until your phone lights up with a text from your kid.
“Mom, my flight was delayed six hours. Can you come back and get me?”
Charlotte is a columnist for The Times. You can reach her at charlottelatvala@gmail.com.
This article originally appeared on Beaver County Times: Latvala: Making travel plans can lead to endless days