What’s summer without a vacation? The last few years have quite spoiled us – after Boracay and Koh Samui, a weekend at Myrtle Beach or Branson – in my snobbiest accent here – “I’ll pass!!” Well, let’s just say that the snobby train doesn’t take you too far from P-town (a.k.a Heart of the Midwest – a.k.a Almost Middle of Nowhere!) So suck it up, take off the obnoxious been-everywhere-seen-it-all expat hat, and start making travel plans!

Flying from Peoria?  There are direct flights to almost nowhere – except of course to Vegas, of all places! – everything is routed through Chicago or St. Loius. So does make more sense to drive to Chicago and park there – and get a flight from O’Hare to anywhere in the whole wide world. Except places that need a visa, and nowhere that the flight time is more than 4 hours, and direct flights only, no transfers, please – other than that, yes, anywhere in the world!!

So I was leaning towards a cruise – Alaska or Hawaii – I’m not picky, I’ll go to either one! None of our dates matched the itineraries, though – plus, either on those would be longer than the week we had in mind. Manasi didn’t care where we went as long as we stayed in a nice hotel – at least one person is easy to please in this family!! Ajey didn’t want one whole week of only sightseeing and touristy stuff – he wanted couple of days of camping/hiking – you know, the ‘fun’ outdoorsy stuff. And then we hit on the perfect solution – head to the North-West!! Seattle and Portland for me, Mt. Rainier for Ajey – happy, happy!!

Once we got the reservation ball rolling, it seemed a shame to not go to Vancouver – didn’t need a visa to go to Canada, and we would be checking one more country off our list!! Once we had that on the itinerary and with all the problems flying in and out of different cities, it was just going to be too much driving – so we regretfully decided to drop Portland. We are getting really good at finding the low-cost airlines – Easyjet in Europe, SpringAir in China, and now – drumroll here – Frontier Airlines – straight from Chicago to Seattle!!

Parking in Chicago used to be a problem – never really liked the idea of leaving our car in the Long-term parking at O’Hare for a week or longer. Then we discovered SpotHero! A perfect way to park in any part of the city, at pretty reasonable rates. This time we found a great spot at the Crowne Plaza at Rosemont – hotels also have shuttles to go to the airport, making getting to the airport a lot easier. Almost done now – flights booked, hotels booked, rental car, parking in Chicago – what else? Of course, a reservation for Sunny at the kitty hotel, and we were all done!!

We always say that the drive to O’Hare takes 3 hours – and you know what, we’ve done this enough times to know better – it never does! There’s always construction or an accident or a UFO landing – traffic is always, always backed up, especially on the 294! Creeping along, counting off the minutes, getting that sick ball of fear – this is it, this is the time we’re going to miss the flight – don’t know why we put ourselves through this!! That’s it – next time we drive to Chicago, I’m going to plan for a 4-hour drive!!

By the time we reached the Crowne Plaza to park our car, in my estimate, we were late, very late. And the shuttle just would not leave!! And then, instead of hitting Terminals 1, 2 and 3 in order, the driver decided to go to the Terminal 5 first – I guess somebody was flying International, whatever!! I was practically bouncing in my seat – come on, come on, come on – we have to get on that flight!! We had already checked in online, and had boarding passes – so dropped off suitcases, and raced to our gate – made it, yay!!

Don’t break out the champagne just yet, though – the flight was delayed. So we waited, and waited and then waited some more – nearly 5 hours – we finally flew out at midnight!! This kind of messed up our plans – hoping to land in Seattle at 10pm (PST), get dinner, check-in and then leave nice and early next morning to Vancouver. Luckily, the shuttles to the rental car place were still running at 3am – and seems like our fortunes are taking a turn for the better – we were upgraded to an Executive class rental. Instead of the sedan we had booked, we got to drive a brand new Nissan Murano!!

First leg done – from Peoria to Seattle by way of Chicago!! Vancouver tomorrow – Canada, here come the Coolkarnis!!