Utah Drivers

Our first blog entry! I can warn you now, I’m not a huge fan of the looking-like-I’m-30-weeks-pregnant phase (even though I am 30 weeks pregnant) so don’t expect to see any recent pictures of me posted anytime soon!

I thought that after our long weekend of visiting New York City and Boston, that it would be the perfect time to start this blog as well as document our trip. To save this from being the longest entry ever, I’ll start off by describing our adventure to the airport.

Utah has had a ridiculous amount of snow this year, and Wednesday February 13th was no exception. We left Provo early, around 7:30 pm, to hang out with my mom, who was staying with my grandma in Salt Lake, for a couple hours before we had to catch our flight at 11:59 pm. Good thing we left that early since it took 4 HOURS (!) to get to the airport. There was white-out and blizzard conditions for roughly 20 miles of our drive, and that 20 miles took about 3.5 hours to get through. Not to mention we got rear ended along the way. That’s right. Rear-ended in a blizzard. And apparently if one grey car hits another grey car in heavy traffic in the winter, there’s no reason to stop. Barry and I did not know this until we got hit while in the carpool lane, realized we couldn’t pull over to the left since it was filled with snow and no way to pull to the right with any guarantee that the car behind us would follow. Keep in mind every single lane is jam packed with semis and school buses and cars and no one is moving at all. So for the thirty seconds (literally) that we took to put the car in park and speak to the 18-year old idiot in the other car, all the Utahns had to honk their horns and yell the F word at us (since it was Wednesday and not Sunday) and tell us, “You’re fine, there’s nothing wrong, just keep driving!” In fact, as Barry was at the window of the driver I was text messaging myself his license plate number (and I’m obviously pregnant and obviously a girl) and some other guy drives past and yells, “Hey Dumb-F, how hard is it to pull over?” Gotta love Utah drivers. Let me also add that the kid was so affected by all the yelling that he finally was like, “I don’t know what to do! I’m from a small town!” Oddly enough, he’s from Price.

This is what being 18, talking on a cell phone alone while tailgating in the car pool lane will cost you. A measly $850 + Rental Car for 3 days:


So we did in fact venture over to the far right line right about when it said the 1200 W exit was in 1 mile. An hour and fifteen minutes later, when we passed the sign that said 1200 W was in ½ mile, I convinced Barry to get out of the car and run back to the kid’s car and sit in there with him to copy the insurance information. It took some convincing and walking alongside the kid’s car for awhile before he let Barry in, but then we got everything and went on our merry way to the airport. Sadly, the traffic was so ridiculous that it didn’t add any time to our trip to be rear-ended. Insanity!

We finally get to the airport a little after 11:30, completely skipping hanging out with my mom altogether. I hurry and drop Barry off with the luggage and park the car as quickly as I can in long-term parking. I ran from shuttle stop to shuttle stop until I finally got picked up by the shuttle… to be dropped off at the wrong terminal.

So I run my pregnant body from terminal 1 to terminal 2 and Barry and I and one other girl were at security. The other girl goes first and the security guy looks at our boarding passes for an obscene length of time before casually shaking his head and saying, “I’m sorry guys, but your boarding passes are for yesterday’s date.” Barry and I, both on the defense, explained that he was an idiot. We explained that it was currently 11:58 pm, our flight leaves at 11:59 pm, and it was in fact February 13 for the next 2 mins. He then casually laughed and attempted to explain why he was confused, when we were forced to interrupt him and exclaim, “What part of 1 minute til departure do you not understand!?!?” I then shoved my phone in my purse and sent it through the conveyor belt. On the other end of the metal detector I see that my phone is in a separate dish, but I assumed that it fell out of my purse and Barry put it in a dish for me. Without putting his shoes back on, Barry and I then proceed to run to our gate. Barry gets there first, to be greeted by a frantic, “Are you the Prices??” He explained that I was shortly behind him, and she said she could only hold the gate for 1 more minute. I round the corner, she doesn’t even check our boarding passes, and we make it on the plane – literally without a second to spare!

As we’re sitting in our seats breathing heavily and saying silent prayers of thanks and laughing to ourselves, I decide to call my mom and tell her that we made it. So I flip open my phone and there is a picture on there that isn’t mine. Confused, I open my purse to retrieve my actual phone. Apparently of all the phones in the whole world, and of all the phone colors that the Chocolate comes in, the one girl that was in the security line with us had the same exact phone and I had stolen it by accident. Why not? By then, the whole day was such a joke that I just went up to the stewardess and told her what happened and washed my hands of the whole mess.

But we made it to NYC! Details on that will be provided later…