Up, up, and Away!

 We are on our way… but it wasn’t easy (or much fun).

With all the horror stories seen on the evening news about the challenges of current-day air travel, we took the “two hours before departure for International flights” mantra seriously. A 1:45 pm departure meant (1x60 … carry the one…) be at the airport at 11:45 am.

Not wanting to disrupt our new routine of walking each day, Alicia and I had decided to get up before dawn (and we had no idea when Dawn was getting up) and go trekking round the neighborhood about 7:30 or 8. Despite getting up at 4 am to see to last minute details, Alicia wasn’t ready to go when I was. It was then decided that I would do my last-half first, circling around to pick up my lady for the triumphant final lap.

Stepping out the front door, I quickly realized it was raining (nothing gets by me!) and, continuing down the street, I pulled out my phone to call my lovely wife and update her, in a meteorological sense. Phone screen showed the call had gone through but… nothing. Turn up the volume to “wake up the neighbors” level… nothing. Select “speaker”… nothing. Sticking the phone inside the hood of my raincoat and flush against my ear… ALICIA’s VOICE MAIL MESSAGE at a painful volume!!!!

A mile or so into my walk in the rain, I received a call from my wife. Her phone was not charging and, with a nearly dead battery, she had gone through troubleshooting steps and determined that she had a bad battery. The repair shop opened at 9am so we had time to buy a battery and still meet our scheduled ride-to-the-airport departure appointment.

We arrived at Batteries Plus as the young man was unlocking the door. That was the good news. Replacing a battery in an iPhone took 2.5 hours. That was the bad news. 

Anyone who knows my wife knows that a day without iPhone is a day without sunshine. She had already timed the drive to the Verizon store to buy a new phone. So off we ran to see if a new phone, complete with carrying case, newly designed charging chords, and all potential sales presentations, could be had in a half-hour window.

All was going well for the first 45 minutes. Then came the transfer-everything-to-the-new-phone trick. Apple, in their customer-service wisdom, had placed a security lock on her old phone to keep her Connect The Words score secure from the prying-eyes of DOGE, put a one hour grace period on transferring data, meaning we could not complete the setup and data transfer of the newly purchased phone before leaving the store.

We did make it home, and ultimately to the airport, on time (walked through TSA at 11:49!). Alicia is traveling with two phones and playing games on my phone! But we are on our way to Atlanta, where, after a two hour layover, we should be in the air again, headed south to Buenos Dias (it’s actually Buenos Aires, but I wanted to demonstrate my thorough grasp of the native language.)