Travel Through Colorado July 2024

Part 1: When life hands you Lemons

Everyone has heard the saying, “When life hands you lemons, you make lemonade”! Well, we have had to “make lemonade” in a LOT of situations and I’d say just about every time we travel big, something happens. It just never fails, something somehow, someway, will inevitably go wrong. I used to get really upset about it, but someone told me along the way once, it’s inevitable to have more travel bumps when you travel often. Ouch. We are blessed to be on the road a lot, and having plans go awry, just means we are one of the lucky ones who actually “Had plans”.

In July, we had the privilege to spend almost 2 full weeks in Colorado. Our plan was to fly into Denver, spend time in Colorado Springs first, and then drive to all 4 National parks, spending a few days at each. Oh, the best laid plans….

The day before we were suppose to fly from Atlanta to Denver, there was a massive global-wide tech outage. It had something to do with a software update from Crowdstrike, and it affected just about every Microsoft operating system. The company that I work for was also affected, and that Friday several folks on my team spent their mornings getting their laptops back up and running. I had heard there were delays at the airport, but didn’t think much about it because I really, genuinely thought it would be resolved by the next day.

I was wrong.

In fact, it didn’t get “resolved” fully for over a week. When we were headed back home 10 days later, it was still all over the news. But let me back up…

We drove to the airport that Friday night because we had booked a room since our flight was so early the next morning. Side note, that was the dingiest, grossest, most disgusting Hilton I had ever stayed at. I don’t know too many nice hotels near the airport, but reader, I would advise that you never stay at the Hilton Garden Inn Atl Airport.

But I digress…

I was able to check us in on my Delta App, I gleefully upgraded our seats, and there was absolutly no indication they were cancelling our flight.

Wrong again.

Around 2:00 AM that night, I woke up…probably because I was nervous we would over sleep our 3:30 am alarm. I picked up my phone and there it was… “We appologize for the inconvenience…blah, blah, blah…Your flight has been cancelled”.

My heart sank. I opened my Delta App and followed the instructions to reschedule, but flights for same day, next day, and even Monday were not coming up with any options. I was devastated.

At this point, I was trying to not wake up Jon and Finley, so I moved myself into the bathroom to call Delta customer service. Sitting on the bathroom floor, in a dingy hotel room in Atlanta, I went into Delta’s hold queue for an hour.

Thats right. I sat in the bathrom, listening to hold music for an hour. I think at one point, I actually got into the shower, fully prepared to jump out in all my glory, if someone picked up that line.

No one picked up.

I finally decided at 3 am, it was time to wake up my party, and decsions had to be made.

I’m not sure that Finley was completely aware what exactly was happening, but after the family got dressed, we three sat on the edge of the bed, in the dingy hotel room, and had a family meeting.

One choice was to go to the airport, speak to a Delta rep, and book the next avalaible flight. We expected the wait to see a rep to take 2 or more hours and the flight to not be until Monday or later.

Our second choice, get in the car and just go.

It did not take us but a few minutes to make the decision to drive. Jon looked it up, and it was 22 hours. We were sure it was going to be at least 22 hours for us to get on another flight, and in fact, it may have taken us 22 hours to actually speak to a Delta rep. Ha!

We packed our bags, checked out of the room, and started on our journey. And what a journey it was!

First stop, Bucees!

I’ve been told that every good road trip has a stop at Bucees. In all the trips we have taken, we have actually never stopped there. So at 5:30 AM, we arrived at the Bucees in Adairsville, Ga.

It was quite the place, actually. We took a quick picture in front of the old Bucees Truck, browsed the shopping area for a car cooler (we did not buy one), and filled up with gas. The food selection was ahhhmazing….pretty much any kind of breakfast item you could want from breakfast wraps, to breakfast biscuits, to breakfast bowls. We grabbed a sandwich, a bacon bowl, a few flavors of beef jerky, a small cup of fruit, drinks, and we were on our way.

Later on, we regretted the jerky.

With our first stop in our rear view, we set our GPS to Colorado Springs, Colorado. We knew this day was going to be long, so we decided to make a stop for lunch in St. Louis, MO to see Gateway Arch National Park. If you know #SheelerPartyof3 in any form, you would know one of the things we LOVE, LOVE, LOVE to do is explore the National Parks. We have a goal to see all 63 of them by the time Finley graduates from High School. We know, we dream big! “If we shoot for the moon, even if we miss, we will fall among the stars”.

Gateway National Park is not a park we have talked about visiting. It’s one of those National Parks that were on the “fill in’s” list, obviously not high priority. But we did it, and it was kinda, sorta neat-o.

The visitor center area was actually enormous inside. It had a lot of history exhibits that visitors can walk through and read all about the making of the arch and the United States westward expansion. You can also go up inside the Arch, but for sake of time, and because the wait time was a few hours away, we did not do that. We did take lots of pictures, but sadly, they don’t exactly reflect the mangitude in height of the Arch.

We hung out at Gateway Arch for about 2 hours, exploring, shopping in the vistors center store, and having a little fun under the arch.