We made a trip to Florida this weekend to visit Mark's Memere & Pepere (grandparents). They live in Melbourne Beach, Florida. We had a great time.
Our flight out of Charlottesville was very early on Thursday morning (5:20am). The airport is tiny so we didn't give ourselves much time to get through the airport. We arrived at 4:55 only to realize luggage being checked must be done 30 mins prior to take off. The clerk helping us was very kind though and got us right on the next flight to Orlando that was routed through Philadelphia instead of Charlotte. Getting through security was an absolute nightmare!! I am traveling with THREE KIDS!!! Hellllooo....I have a small bottle of hand sanitzer in every pocket of every bag not to mention the extra ones I have floating around in the bottom of my carry on bags. Did I mention they're floating around with about 15 other liquids, gels and medicines that must all be in a quart sized ziploc baggie in order for security to let us through. Yeah, what a pain. I had to unpack all of our carry on bags all over the floor of the airport security line in order to dig all these dangerous items out. Don't forget Gabe's 6 bottles of liquid formula that they wanted to toss out. Luckily we had a doctors note and they let us through with them. They did take the bottle he was drinking and stick a little paper tab in it to check it for explosives.....which I'm sure he'd be happily drinking down just fine right? Shoes off everyone...Hailey & Gabe too. Well, we finally made it to the gate only to hear "ok, pull those three bags" yeah, you guessed it....ours. I was like "no no, we're here we're here!" She looked up at me totally irritated seeing I had three kids, three bags, a double stroller and a car seat that all had to go down an escalator to get to the plane which we were delaying. After a brief lecture she let us through and we boarded our flight to Philly. The rest of the trip down went without problems and we arrived in Orlando around 10:45am.
Whew! Were we happy! Finally we made it and wanted nothing more than to get in our rental and get some lunch. We got our bags from baggage claim and made it over to Budget; joining the other 100 people in line ahead of us. So we waited.....and waited....oh good finally our turn! We got to the clerk and asked for the two carseats that we had reserved the day before or flight. Looking at us like we were crazy he informed us that they don't reserve carseats and that he didn't think there were any but would check. He checked and said nope, no more carseats. We we started having a fit since we didn't bring our own and didn't have another plan. He decided he would check the rental garage and sure enough there were two more carseats but that it was gonna be 10.00 a day per carseat. This was something we weren't told when we called about reserving them. We needed them for 5 days! We could have bought new ones at this price! Well we sucked it up and coughed out the extra money for the carseats and can you belive he had the nerve to say 'would you like to upgrade your car for only 15.00 more dollars a day?' I said no way, how about you compensate for your companys lacking and give it to us for free? and he said no he couldn't do that. Whatever, Budget just sucks.
We got our car and met Mark's father for lunch and then made our hour and half trip over to Melbourne Beach. When we got there Mark's sister Lesli, husband Paul, and kids Nathan & Megan were there at Memere & Pepere's house too. They drove over from Tampa FL. It was great to see everyone and meet Megan for the first time. She was born January 8th 2008.
This is Memere & Pepere's house. They eat dinner every night at 6:00pm. This is Robin, Aunt Linda and Memere preparing dinner. They made us full meals every night except one we had pizza. It was really nice to all sit down together in the dining room and eat together.
This is cousin Nathan
Gabe was very facinated by the two babies!!
