Good People.

Recently I was pleasantly surprised and shocked at how nice most people really are, specifically people from Texas. As you may recall back in November we visited Texas, and had a great time. While we were there so many people stopped to tell us how beautiful they thought Linden was. And of course we think she’s beautiful, but we are her parents and it is our duty to think our child is the most perfect creature on the planet. Strangers here have occasionally said how cute they think Linden is, but in Texas it happened every place we went.
Last week we traveled again to Texas but this time to take a cruise out of Galveston. Being that the cruise was leaving from Galveston 90% of the people on board were of course from Texas, and yet again we were shocked at how nice and friendly everyone was. Even while stuck at sea for 24 hours, no one was arguing or complaining, people just rolled with it. Kicked back and relaxed for one more day, laughed and had a good time.
We were scheduled to dock in Galveston at 7:00 am on Thursday morning; however the fog was so incredibly thick the Port authority had closed the Port of Galveston. So every hour for about 10 hours the cruise director came over the PA and let us know the status, by 6:00 pm the National Weather Service had extended the fog warning until Midnight, and the Cruise Director came on to say we would not be docking until the next day. I have never saw fog like the fog that day, you could barely see the water and it was that way the entire day. I would have taken a picture, but there really was nothing to take a picture of.
Being that we did not dock as planned, we missed our flight home. Originally we planned to take the Dow Shuttle from Houston back to Michigan. Being that there was no shuttle Friday we had to look at commercial flights home. Because there were so many people who had to make flight changes, the flight options for us were awful. It was going to cost over $1000 for us to fly home, and due to layovers etc. it would have taken about 12 hours. Once we knew this, we had resolved ourselves to driving home from Texas!
Thankfully someone suggested we take the Dow Shuttle from Houston to Baton Rouge and then rent a car and drive from there. So that is exactly what we did. We had a few hours to kill before the flight to Baton Rouge, so we were hanging out in the Signature Flight building that Dow uses as its hub. It is really nothing more than a portable double wide trailer, but they do furnish snacks and drinks. Since people in Texas are so friendly the Signature maintenance person that happened to be having a snack wasted no time in striking up a conversation with us about where we were headed and when. Once he realized we had 4 hours to kill, he suggested we go over to the Main Signature building where we could watch TV, use the free computer and just hang out. We thought that sounded pretty good, so we asked him to point us the way. Once outside, he decided to flag down a rental car porter who agreed to drive us around the other side of the driveway to the other building. See what I mean, Texans are sooo nice!
Finally it was time for our flight, so we walked back over to the terminal boarded the super tiny plane to Baton Rouge and took off. When we arrived in Baton Rouge the plane pulled right inside of the hanger and we went inside another portable trailer type building. I asked Matt if his rental car keys were waiting with the other keys and he said no. The captain happened to overhear us and suggested that Avis must not have delivered our car. So the captain went behind the desk and called over to Avis, unfortunately he was correct, they hadn’t brought our car over. Matt and I were getting ready to make the walk over to the main airport terminal (with our luggage), when the Captain said just give me a minute and I’ll take you over there. He might have been from Louisiana, I’m not sure but again how nice of him to offer, and thank goodness he did because the main airport was not really in convenient walking distance.
Maybe it was the thought of the long journey ahead of us, or all the trouble we were going through to get home, but the friendliness and helpfulness of complete strangers was just so uplifting to me. We (or I should say Matt) drove straight through from Louisiana to Michigan and we finally got home Saturday Morning at 10:00.
Stay tuned for pictures and details of our cruise.