joegoda | Where do I begin...

I guess.. at the beginning.

Last Thursday, the 30th of June, Shannon and I spent the night in Tulsa, so we wouldn't miss our flight out at 6:00 am. That should have been the first sign. The hotel that Shannon booked in T-town was one of those "We charge by the day, week, month or hour" sort of hotels. It's not her fault. She found what she thought was the most cost efficient way of staying the night in Tulsa. And, it was. For a reason.

When I got to this hotel, the name of which has been thankfully blotted out by almost enough Johnny Walker Red and some serious sunburn on the calves, the guy at the front desk, a nice enough gent from the GQ school of good-looking and standing with a "I'm a nice guy who is incredibly bored, so what can I do ya for" sort of attitude let me know that Hotels.com is notorious for being slow as a Hebrew Christmas in getting the reservations through to the hotel.

The lobby was tucked away under some solid concrete, like a bunker. The television was turned to some comedy that wasn't funny the decade that it was produced. The decor was something something polyester naugahyde and not too far away from threadbare. The room was on the second floor and the second step up was broken.

and it was a concrete step. and it had an orange cone on it. Heck, I even remember thinking... "This doesn't bode well."

By the way, this hotel had been rated 1.4 stars on the Hotels.com website. I think that's a fair rating. It was clean, there were no bugs, no gun shots fired in the night. It was just a very ratty little rathole that rats lived in. Two legged rats.

Okay.

4:30 am comes along. I've been asleep for maybe 3 hours. We trundle the bags down the stairs and into the Van and head out to the airport. I drop Shannon off at the doors and go to park the van in the outdoor lot. I know exactly where I parked. Near Shuttle stop one. I know this because a shuttle watched me pull in at dark 30 and just sat there. I walked to the terminal, where Shannon had pulled our bags in and was trying to get checked in through the Kiosk thing.

The Kiosk thing, because we were flying out of the country, required a scan of the passport. Mine went just fine, Shannon's did not. So it was about 5:30 by the time we got up to the security checkpoint.

It took about 20 minutes to get through the checkpoint, because I was a nice guy and let a family of four go ahead of us. Yeah... Tulsa airport is that busy at that time of day. We got to the terminal at 10 minutes before 6 and the damn doors were already closed. Nobody was standing at the gate to say "Hey! You're almost late!"

Apparently, there is a TSA rule that the doors have to close 10 minutes before the flight. I guess this is so that terrorists who show up late or at the last minute can't get on, while those who are punctual are treated like everybody else.

So... we missed our flight out of Tulsa. This isn't to say that we missed the vacation. Heck no! It was already paid for and was not refundable.

Fortunately with the help of a gent named Caleb, we were able to book a flight to Atlanta that was leaving at 10 am. We made this flight because we never left the Tulsa terminal.

So.. with a little bit of fortune, and I mean a VERY little bit, we were able to continue on our adventure.

Tomorrow (It's 11 pm and then some), I'll continue with the story in a chapter called "What do you mean you don't know where it is?"