Last day in the USA

The day we left started just like any other… Oh wait, did I already use that one? Actually it started with breakfast at the hotel before taking Greta and Tiki down the road to United Airlines PetSafe / Cargo check-in. They said to check in the pets at least two hours before their flight, but I was there around 8 for an 11:20 am scheduled departure since our flight left at 12:05 and we needed time for ourselves. The check-in process was pretty smooth, mainly just a bunch of forms to sign. After a fare increase that took effect the day before their flight Greta and Tiki’s flight to LA was decently expensive, but United took good care of them and arranging it ourselves was quite a bit cheaper than having the pet transport company do it. The one hitch was that I couldn’t find Greta’s medicine when I went to check her in. I had put everything of theirs together in Greta’s unassembled crate so I could just roll out in the morning, but it was nowhere to be found at check in. It’s for incontinence (sorry Greta) so not the end of the world if I couldn’t find it, but I figured it would be easily found in the hotel room, so planned on coming back to drop it off.
With that I said goodbye to Greta and Tiki as they took them in their crates behind the counter. Greta was happy-go-lucky as always, making friends with people in the waiting room right up until the moment she had to get in her crate. She looked at me like “wait, I thought those were for cats”. I headed back to the hotel room where Kelly and hopscotch were packed and ready to go. Strangely, Greta’s medicine was nowhere to be found, so we loaded up our luggage and drove over to drop off the rental car. It was nice to be rid of our bags after checking in and our flight out was uneventful as we said goodbye to Colorado.

As a scientist you are taught to be explicit about the assumptions you use. In this case, I assumed that as a major international airport, LAX would have a place where you can store your luggage, as every other major international airport does. It does not. Instead they have a service where, for something like $18 a bag they will take your luggage to some off-site storage. Unfortunately we didn’t discover this until we were about to leave Denver, so we arrived in LA with 10 hours to kill and nothing to do unless we paid a smal fortune to check all of our bags and car seat. This made Kelly cross. So, with a quick call we reserved a car with Avis and hopped on the shuttle bus. The rental car check in was a royal cluster, and I contemplated just saying forget it, but stuck with it. With a car finally in hand around 3 pm we headed down to Santa Monica and spent the afternoon at the pier going on the ferris wheel, having a last taste of Mexican food and sampling the Pacific from the eastern side.

We arrived back at the airport around 8:30 pm and checked into our flight.   It was nice to be rid of our baggage again, even if we did have to pay an excess baggage fee for one extra bag.  We had a little while to wait once we got to the gate and Hopscotch was still hanging in there, telling us about how her doll was very tired and wanted to sleep.  She was asleep before we left the ground, and we all managed to get at least a few hours of shut eye during the 10.5 hour flight before landing in Nadi, Fiji!