The Spawn’s Surprise Trip

The Spawn really really wanted to take a flight somewhere. He didn’t care where. This was something he had been mentioning off and on for the last year. According to him, he had never flown before (this was untrue, though he was under a year old the last time). So for his 10th birthday, we scheduled a trip to anywhere… Actually Atlanta, GA.

Everything was scheduled and the Spawn was unaware of any of it (partially because we wanted to surprise him and partially because he hounds us about trips when he knows about them). As the trip was getting closer, so was Beryl…

I kept a close eye on the storm and had a feeling it would turn towards us. Lo and behold, it did. A direct hit on our home. We lost power and cell service for several days. The Spawn still knew nothing about the trip. Now it was more to keep him from being disappointed if we couldn’t fly out of the airport.

Wednesday arrived and the flight was on time. We tried an airlines neither myself nor my husband has been on before (Frontier). I actually liked the flight, though the chairs hurt my butt after a while. The Spawn got a window seat and we proceed to explain every whir and bump to him. He absolutely loved the flight.

We rode the MARTA from the airport to the hotel. Atlanta’s subway/tram system. Sometimes the tram was underground and you exited from a subway like station and sometimes it was above ground and you exited from a few stories up. The Spawn enjoyed all the trams and subways we took.

I used Chat GPT to help me schedule the trip. It gave me some ideas of places to explore with a 10-year-old as well as local favorite restaurants to try. We explored the Coca-Cola factory then walked across the green to the Atlanta Aquarium one day. Another day we spent the entire day at Stone Mountain Park. We rode a gondola to the top, rode a train around the mountain and explored the prehistoric section. We attempted to get some Georgia BBQ to compare to Texas, but we mistakenly went to a Texas style BBQ restaurant (Fox Bro’s BBQ) that was listed as a local favorite.

The Spawn also got to experience his first, second, third… Uber ride. He had a list of questions he asked every driver. “Do you like being an Uber?” “How long have you been an Uber?” “Have you ever had any Karen’s?” We only had one driver who was disinclined to talk with him.

On our last day, we took the MARTA back to the airport. We spent half the day exploring the airport before settling down at our gate. The flight was uneventful… until we got to Houston.

Several minutes before we landed the pilot got on the speaker and told us there were some storms he was going to fly around and it might be a bit bumpy. It was and when he landed we had a cross-wind which made the landing a bit bumpy. We taxied to the tarmac where we learned that there was another plane still at our gate. They couldn’t push off until they finished loading and they had to keep stopping because of the lightning strikes. We were told it would be a few minutes.

15 minutes later the pilot came back on telling us that we would be here for another 20 minutes at least. As time passed, people were getting antsy and making jokes that were not funny. The Spawn was getting scared. Momma bear came out and told the men making the jokes to keep it down. Andy thought he was going to have to fight someone.

After 3 hours of sitting on the tarmac (longer than the actual flight) and several “updates that weren’t updates,” we were able to change gates and taxied to a new location where we could get off the plane. This was the longest I have ever been stuck on the tarmac before, and hopefully never again.