Monday, August 27 – Quality Inn, Shawnee, OK

Up early, clean, fed and waiting for our friendly Uber driver Steve to pick us up.  He’s early, here by 8.20am.  It was a nice uneventful drive to LAX, no traffic holdups and it only took 25 minutes.  Goodbye LA!

The check in to Delta for the first leg to Salt Lake City was a breeze, even though we are at the second biggest airport in the US, but thereafter it went a bit pear shaped.  We were late leaving LAX due to air traffic, this is at 10.25am so we missed our connection at SLC to OK by 4 minutes, even though we brisk walked from terminal B to terminal D which of course is at the exact opposite corner of the airport.  We weren’t the last hopeful passengers to rock up there red faced and puffing either.  However, it was easily remedied by going to the bank of red delta phones and talking to a real person and we are already booked on the next flight at 8.15pm tonight.  When you understand it doesn’t actually matter that plans have gone awry you just get on with it and make the most of the situation.  Would be much worse if you had a deadline.

So only about 7 hours to fill in at an airport (we already put our clocks forward one hour and will do again a little later).  Anyway the time passed relatively quickly by reading, eating, playing solitaire etc.  We also phone the hotel to advise we would be there after midnight and get hold of Enterprise to change our pick up time too.  Enterprise closes their airport office at midnight and we land at 11.35 so devise a cunning strategy – as soon as we arrive Kim will race off in the bus to the rental car terminal and I will wait for the bags, hopefully they followed us to OK (they weren’t on the carousel but they were in the baggage office, so no drama).

The first flight was in a 737, good leg room, a screen and nice coffee although I was in the middle seat and the friendly grandfather (returning from his granddaughter's 2nd birthday) sitting next to me wanted to chat, but he couldn’t hear me answer!  So I ended up doing most of the talking 'cos I had to say everything twice.  But them I'm kinda used to that!  The second flight was in a smaller plane, the seating configuration 2x2 so no chatty neighbour this time and no screen, but they did serve wine!  Plus I could see out the window and I was surprised that there always seemed to be lights below us.  The moon was big, full I think.

We had a car choice of a Chrysler Pacifica people mover or a Chrysler Pacifica people mover, Kim picked a nice colour for our Chrysler Pacifica.  I guess we are lucky, if we had ordered this grade of vehicle it would have been double the price and we get it for the full size rate and we have earned a couple of free days as well.

We arrive at the Quality Inn, Shawnee about 40 miles later along the I40 at just on 1am (11pm to us) and hit the sack.  Feel sorry for the staff member who drew the short straw!