Getting There - August 3rd

 I did everything I could to ensure we had a smooth flight to Iceland. We left the house at 10 AM for a 4:19 PM flight to Chicago, we had 3-hour lay-over in Chicago... What could go wrong? We checked in with our airline and got our boarding passes about 11:54, but couldn't check our bags until 12:19 PM. So we drug all our luggage to the closest food court to get something to eat. Then we drug all our luggage back to the ticket counter and got our 2 biggest suitcases checked in. When we went through TSA, it surprisingly wasn't very busy, but it seemed to take forever to get through it anyway. We went to our gate, arriving about 2 hours before they were supposed to start boarding. I sat down to wait with our carry-on luggage. Hubby, who works hard to get 10k steps walked every day, would sit for about 2 minutes at a time before getting up to go 'walk-about'.

Coming back from one of his walks, Hubby noticed our flight was delayed by 20 minutes. Not to worry; we would still have plenty of time to catch our next flight in Chicago. About the timie we should have started loading, the airplane finally came in. We heard an announcement that our flight was delayed until 5:30, and they would start loading at 4:30. Too late; it wasn't even 4 PM yet, and people were lining up to start loading.

The pilot was very wishy-washy about what time they were going to take off, even after they loaded everybody on the plane. They finally took off about 6:30 or so, more than 2 hours late, because of a storm in the Chicago area that was slowing everything down. They had to fly around the storm, and landed about 9:15, about 3 hours late. Luckily, the flight to Iceland was 'slightly' delayed, and we managed to hurry to the next concourse before they shut the doors, but had to check our carry-on luggage. BUT one of those held 2 laptops for us to use on the cruise, and they had to come out and be carried by us onto the plane.

So, we got situated in our seats and breathed a sigh of relief. Then the captain announced they had a minor mechanical problem, and hopefully, it would soon be fixed. We finally took off about 2 hours late and settled in to watch some movies.