Vacation Day 1: Flying and Hurricane Irene

Here starts the long saga of our vacation to Maryland (and Delaware!)

Friday night we packed everything and I let Lilli pick out which toys she wanted in her backpack. She's really into little figurines, cars and princesses right now. She's just not much of a babydoll kid, so luckily all the things she likes to play with will easily fit in a carry-on. I thought her selection was really interesting - one Southwest plane (I got that for her the first time we flew), another plane we got in Houston last year, dolphin, fish, garbage truck, air traffic controller, a prince (all the princesses were packed last minute), and two barrettes.We had an 8 am flight, which is a bit earlier than I prefer, but in the case of arriving before Hurricane Irene worked out great as it would be the last flight to Baltimore from Nashville before cancellations that day. We lugged all our junk in, and breezed through security. We even ran into an old college mate in the security line that we haven't seen in ages. She did tell Lilli she and I were great buds in college but I stopped her before she could tell her any of the many, many things we did together to get in trouble with our dorm mom over the years we spent in Scott Hall.
Lilli was SO excited to see the airplanes. She just loves to fly. Tonight when I was tucking her in she asked if she could ride the airplane tomorrow and when I told her it might be a awhile she got very sulky and sad.
Everything was going pretty smoothly until we got on and sat and sat and sat. Everyone was pretty impatient to go because many people had connecting flights elsewhere, and the Baltimore airport was being shut down at noon, and our plane was scheduled to land at 10:40. When we saw the luggage all coming back off we knew it was a bad sign. Our plane was grounded because the wipers weren't working. We had to go all the way to the complete opposite end of the airport and load a different plane. We ended up taking off one hour late, with an estimated landing time of 11:45.
Lilli was great on the plane. She's so incredibly easy to travel with now. She wants pretzels and either her VReader or sticker books, and she's pretty easy to entertain. She even used the airplane bathroom a couple of times and we had absolutely no potty training problems or accidents the whole trip. She's been potty trained since late March, but in these crazy situations when sometimes you just can't go (like when the fasten seat belts light is on!) you just hope she's big enough to hold it.

The closer we got to Baltimore the cloudier it got, but it really was not a bumpy flight at all. We've been on MUCH bumpier flights when you can see lightning and such around, so it wasn't a big deal at all. It was just light rain when we landed, and they held flights for everyone on our plane so it seemed like everyone would be able to make it to their final destinations.
Lilli enjoyed riding the rental car/parking shuttles almost as much as flying. Most every day she gets mad at me because she wants to ride the city bus home.
We got the car and got to our hotel room at about 1 pm. The hurricane was supposed to be heavy from 3-5 pm, but it slowed down so much it really didn't peak until 1-3 am, and the rain wasn't very heavy until around 8 pm. We still didn't want to get out in it, so we just relaxed in the room and watched a LOT of cartoons. Spinning around in the desk chair was also a favorite activity.
Hour long tubbies were also a big activity on this trip. They've somewhat continued once we got home, although with less water usage since we have to pay this bill.
All in all we had a pretty good first day. Unfortunately the hurricane caused a lot of attractions to close, so we ended up never being able to make it to the Museum of Art which was pretty disappointing, but all in all just making it to Baltimore and not being overly affected by Irene made the first day of vacation pretty successful!