When I booked the tickets for this trip, I never realized that I would be extending my birthday by three hours. Yay! Extra birthday awesomeness!

My night was mostly sleepless. Why is so hard to sleep before a trip? Why does Matt wake me up at 2:00 AM when we have a long travel day ahead? Why do I wake up early when I can sleep late?

After my shower, I got our kitchen in order and packed the items Matt had assembled. Our morning was low stress - we didn't have to leave the house until 10:30! It was such a great idea to plan a trip with an afternoon departure from RIC - only 20 minutes from our house.

Just before we left, Matt gave me a birthday present - new leg strap covers! Awesome! They were perfect.What a great addition to my skydiving gear. Even though I stand up most of my landings now, these would come in handy when I wanted to slide in.

Over the weekend, I purchased a carry-on suitcase for Matt's rig and two travel pillows.  We decided that we'd carry-on all of our gear and check our clothes. There was no way we wanted to arrive in Seattle without our rigs.  We put our helmets, cameras, altimeters, and goggles in a back pack and used the other one for the pillows and snacks.

When we got to the airport, Matt breezed through security right in front of me and the baggage handler pulled my bag off the conveyor belt.  For some reason, this always happens to me!  As soon as he picked it up, I looked at him and said, "It's a skydiving rig. Just like the other one that went through right before it." I told him that I had a letter form the FAA if he wanted to see it, but he just put it back on the belt and let me go on my way.  Thank goodness!

We checked our clothes bag and grabbed some lunch and went to our gate. While we were waiting, Matt noticed that they were making people from our flight check their "oversized" bags. Apparently, we'd be taking a smaller plane from Richmond to Detroit.  This was pretty irritating since I purchased suitcases that met the carry-on requirements.

When it came time to board, the Delta rep said we'd need to check our bags.  I told her that we couldn't check them because our connection was only 30 minutes after we landed. We wouldn't have time to wait for them. She said I could discuss it with the stewardess, but gave us tags to check them.  

One of the first class passengers was standing in the hallway outside of the aircraft.  He told us that there was no way we'd be able to take our bags on board, but I was not going to let him stop me from asking. I approached the stewardess and explained our situation with a short connection and she told us to try to get them in the over head bins.  

Unfortunately, they didn't fit! Ugh! Matt took his and shoved it under the seat in front of us. He put it in sideways so it took up the space of two items, but we could put our backpacks up top. Now, we just needed to figure out a spot for mine.

Matt was scouting around the cabin and suggested I place it where there were small kids, but a very nice stewardess named Rhonda said I could put it in the back of the plane because they had some vacant seats. AWESOME!!!

When I booked the flight, I intentionally gave us 3 hour layover in Detroit - plenty of time to make our connection. However, at some point, Delta changed our reservations. The short connection was not poor planning on my part. To make matters worse, we would be landing in the B terminal and taking off from the A terminal. Rhonda told us that we'd have to hustle to get there in time.

We had a slight delay on take off, but winds were working in our favor. Our scheduled arrival time was 2:50, but we landed at 2:17. It was nice to have a little extra time to make our 3:20 connection to Seattle. It gave us a chance to walk around before we boarded the next plane.

The rest of the trip went smoothly. I put on my head phones and watched television.  When we landed in Seattle, it was right around 5:00 PM. We grabbed our luggage from baggage claim and took the shuttle to get the rental car. Next stop...FOOD!