Knoxville – Charlotte – Atlanta
May 25, 2019
Today is the day! We hit the road just a bit earlier than planned, around 9:45 AM or so. This was after the multitude of preparing-the-home tasks such as turning down the hot water, putting up post-it notes for our house sitters, setting up the kitty cam, washing, drying, and putting up all of our breakfast dishes (can’t have any clutter when we get back!), going through every single electronic device and making sure it’s either off or unplugged, and turning off the water to the toilet that randomly fills up due to a seal leak (or something). There were so many small things that I wouldn’t normally think about, but since we’re going away for this long, wanted to be extra thorough. We also put the fridge on Vacation Mode (which I didn’t know was a thing until I accidentally discovered the option on the fridge menu panel). Emily did a fantastic job of planning ahead so that we didn’t have much leftover food or other perishables before we left for our trip. It was basically condiments and butter that was left. It was so hard to say goodbye to the kitties! We are going to miss them SOO much during the next three weeks!!!
Our trip to the Charlotte airport was relatively uneventful. No horrible traffic which was actually surprising to me because it is Memorial Day weekend. We had a great lunch stop in Hendersonville, NC at Chick-fil-A (of course) for a good meal and stretch break. Funnily enough, the whole 4ish hour trip was completely uneventful until we were trying to pull into the long-term parking lot at the Charlotte airport. Some guy was trying to go out of the entrance lane to the parking lot. I saw him and waited for him to either turn out of the entrance in the correct direction into the flowing traffic or give up and turn around and go through the parking lot. Neither of these things happened, though. After waiting about 30 seconds while he backed up tried again to turn around and then backed up again, the guy behind me got impatient and went around me AND the other guy WHILE HE WAS STILL BACKING UP. I swear he came within inches of colliding. Crazy!!!
After passing the backing-up guy (he seemed to be confused) and entering the parking lot and after searching for what seemed an eternity, we finally found a parking place in section UU and rode a shuttle bus to the main terminal.
Seems like a pretty nice airport, though I can see the problem with it. I hear the complaints about having to run through the airport. This makes total sense because all of the terminals are connected through a main hallway. So if you have to go from terminal A to terminal F, you better get going. All you’ve got is some moving sidewalks. No tram or anything. It’s under quite a bit of construction…seems like they’re building a new parking garage and trying to modernize the appearance of the whole building. Our section of the A terminal is under construction…work lights, exposed insulation, missing ceiling tiles everywhere. The other part of the A terminal is super nice, looks like they just renovated it.
The reason we flew out of Charlotte in the first place is because we saved nearly $550 per person. I checked both Atlanta and Nashville and they ran about $1300 per ticket. Flying out of Charlotte ran about $750. This doesn’t actually make sense because we are flying TO ATLANTA to connect to London Heathrow. Airline prices…who understands them??? I wasn’t planning on buying air fare that day, but as soon as I saw that deal I immediately got out my credit card. Even after gas and parking fees, we still saved so much!! I was a bit nervous to fly out of Charlotte, since I was originally supposed to connect through Charlotte for the trip to propose to Emily. However, the airplane I was supposed to take was delayed from Charlotte, which meant I couldn’t make my connection to Salt Lake City in Charlotte. Fortunately, our plane has been at our gate ever since we got here, so it should be here and ready for takeoff as soon as we’re all boarded. (Post addition: because the plane was sitting there so long, it took about 20-30 extra minutes for them to cool the plane so we could board! But we still made it on time to Atlanta.)
Step Metrics (est): 6,480 steps; 3 miles; 285 cal; 1h 5m time
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