Misadventures of a Midlife Married Couple

May 10, 

WHAT A COUPLE OF WEEKS… lots of moving parts settling into place this last week.  We have a buyer for the truck (my little non-DNA niece Trin will have a nice ride for her first car), and our great friends from forever are going to move into the house… lease signed last weekend!  Last weekend I started the process of uhhhh packing… and lets just say holy crap. This is going to be a long process.  But, that said, we’re officially having some packing progress… micro as it may be!  I have cleaned out closets and have a stack to drop off at the battered women’s shelter. I have fewer than 10 work days before the school year ends, then I can really focus on the departure prep.   If anyone just really enjoys packing random boxes please let us know! 

Yesterday was NUTS… I booked our flights from Fairbanks to Kotzebue… then I messaged with Alaska Air to reserve Cargo space for the pups (as I had been advised to do) now here is where it went sideways… and by sideways I mean SIDEWAYS… behind, diagonally, up… down… just basically completely insane. 

Here is where it got fun…

First, I discovered that we can only get one dog on the flights we had booked out of Fairbanks. 

THEN, when I ask them to check Monday it is the same situation and I find out that because we are flying on a regional jet changing dates won’t help, they only have room for one crate the size we need on those planes. 

If we reroute and fly through Nome we can get both dogs to Kotz with us… except arrival would be after the last local plane for Noatak has left and there is not a single place in Kotz to stay with the dogs.  Soooo I confirmed that we had one dog booked on my flight Sunday… (this is important, I will come back to this) then I went through American (I was able to use American miles) and got Marty’s flight changed from Sunday to Monday (thanks American for doing so free of charge).  Then back to online chat with Alaska Air where I jumped back into the cargo reservation adventure. We got one dog locked in flying with Marty from Fairbanks to Kotz YAY!! At that time I had our other cargo reservations checked…just because I felt like it would be good to confirm everything…. and it’s a good thing! The lady who had made the reservations FROM OKC to Fairbanks had put them under MY confirmation code instead of his… (we are on the same flight… so no big deal) we had both dogs booked to Seattle but then it gets messy. I am going to Portland while he heads to Fairbanks… so she had booked ONE dog to Portland with me and done nothing with the other… because that flight is a regional jet that won’t hold two 500 series kennels… she didn’t mention this at all!! I guess the other pup was just going to chill in Seattle because we only had one space reserved for the last leg of the day! First  we got that fixed so both are confirmed to travel with him to Fairbanks.  got one dog booked on both legs of his flight, had her double check mine… turns out my confirmation for a dog was only for Fairbanks to Anchorage… not the second leg of the trip… so THAT had to be fixed.  After almost three hours total of back and forth online chats and reservation changes we finally got confirmations for both dogs for all the multiple legs.  YIKES…  

So now I will fly into Noatak on Sunday and Marty will follow on Monday, each with luggage and one dog.  🙂 

They’re lucky we love them. LOL.