The Summer Adventures of Frog & Toad: Griswold's Summer Vacation -- Part I

Shhh! No one mention the car seats to Jim!

Hope you've settled in somewhere comfy with some power bars and a jug of water cause this is going to be a long one and its only Part I. Oh who am I kidding? The only person reading this post (other than family members who actually attended the vacation) is my mother. *waves* And I've already forced her to look at the 943,256 pictures on my phone. And lets be honest, who doesn't prefer to look at thousands of pictures on a 4 inch screen? If she needs a new eye glasses prescription this fall I only have myself to blame.

Here is my attempt at summarizing a jam-packed family-filled trip, most of which was spent in our rental Ford family truckster. And much like the pea green truckster featured in the "original" Vacation, ours was returned in less that pristine condition. Still waiting on the insurance claim so keep your fingers crossed!

We had a tumultuous start to vacation, to say the least. After standing in the United bag drop line for over an hour, we finally made it to the front *jazz hands* with 30 minutes to spare before our flight departed. However, this is the moment we realized, thanks to the helpful United agent, that we were in fact not flying on United, we were flying American Airlines. WTF!?

So we loaded up our NINE bags and two children and made a dash to the American counter, waving as we happened to pass a friend headed to see his family in Georgia. "Hi, Paul, bye Paul" After a bit of confusion as to whether we could even check our bags at this point we left Jim with the bags and headed down to security. Naturally, they were unable to take the bags from Jim so he had to haul six of our bags to another location to be scanned then dropped. I think he appreciated me calling him several times to check on his progress and ask what was taking so long.

Able to skip to to the front of the entire security line we had 12 minutes until our flight was to take off, clearly it would be smooth sailing from here so we went on ahead and left Jim with the two car seats to be gate checked so I could take the boys to the bathroom. Well we get to the gate but there is no Jim. Yep, you guessed it I started texting and calling. Dude, where are you?? It was only later that I found out the car seats barely fit through the scanners but not in their protective covers, so Jim had the joy of taking them out, scanning and then having to stuff them back into their nice covers. So much for keeping them away from the germy security process.

We some how manage to get on board even as the gate agent yelled to us as we past her that she couldn't guarantee the plane door would be open by the time we got down the jet way. Spoiler alert: Our bags obviously didn't make the flight. Though at that point I didn't even care I was just so relieved we'd made it. We picked up the car, grabbed breakfast and swung back around the airport to pick up our now arriving bags and headed off to Wisconsin! I thought it was all hilarious about 30 seconds into our flight. Jim, not so much. I'm not sure he finds it funny even now!

***Note: there are no pictures of this part of the trip!***

Absolutely perfect.

After an easy peasy five hour drive we checked into our condo at the Yacht Club and checked out our patio which over looked Sister Bay and just breathed in the beauty of Door County.

I had intended to do the whole two weeks in one post but our airport escapade really did take up quite some space so I'll save the second week for my next post. Here is our little family adventure before the rest of the Morrell family arrived....