Copper Mountain (Day 6 of 6)

Packed and ready to leave the condo

Tuesday February 16, 2010

We were up early and got out pretty much when we had planned. It was a clear day for the drive back to Denver. We stopped by the nearby town of Frisco on the way back and loved all the cute storefronts. We were going to drive through Breckenridge as well, but the route wasn't clearly marked and we ended up back at I-70 so we just got back on and headed east to Denver.

The roads were clear, but dirty. Our rented SUV was filthy and I kept having to spray my windshield to wipe the grit away. That's one thing about Atlanta, everything stays pretty clean without all the snow and grime. My sister Kelley always remarks about how clean Atlanta is (except for the smog) when she comes back home from Alaska.

Several years back when we were returning from Keystone, I was so worried about making our flight that somehow I got everybody up and ready in the wee hours of the morning Atlanta time so that we were at the Denver airport a little before 6 am Denver time instead of the intended 8 am. That was brought up a number of times again this trip.

The rental SUV was a GMC Terrain. It was nice and well appointed, but it's always a little strange figuring out the controls for a car that is not a Honda since we've been driving Honda's for so long. We stopped to fill the rental car up with gas before returning it and searched for a good 10 minutes, including looking in the owner's manual, for the switch to unlock the gas tank before I finally gave up and went out to see if you needed to use a key or something. It still took me another minute or two before I finally figured out that there was no lock.

We returned the car and took the shuttle back to the airport. We had to do all the check in stuff and then the security. I'm pretty sure that it would be worth a couple of planes going down every once in a while as a trade off for not having to deal with the security stuff. Every time we go through it's different. Things that have passed time after time all the sudden get flagged or that particular airport doesn't like how you've arranged certain things. Then throw in the kids and it is a royal pain. This time it was some little swiss army like device housed in a credit card like container that I keep in my wallet. It has passed security many times. This time it got flagged and it took a while to straighten it all out. They offered to mail it to me for a fee. I told them I didn't even remember I had it and never use it so they could keep it. I didn't really see the danger. There was a small nail file like thing about 2 inches long with a pretty dull blade.

We had a nice leisurely lunch at McDonalds and Domino's. Food courts are great for the variety, but sometimes it's so hard for everyone to decide. Helen even splurged on a Carribou Coffe. And then somehow I messed up with the gate assignment. I could have sworn that the gate assignment that flashed on the electronic check in showed something like gate 514. Well it turns out that the gates stop at 515. We figured that out and then realized that our actual gate was something like 547 - all the way at the other end of the concourse. I think it was about a mile away. So after thinking we had plenty of time, we ended up being the last people to board and had to check some of our carryons because, of course, there was no more room in the overhead bins. And the space we did find for one of our bags was way in the back of the plane so when we landed we had to wait for everyone else to get off before we could retrieve it...nice.

We landed in Atlanta and, thankfully, there were no problems with our baggage. I told Helen I would pull the car around, but she said everybody could walk so we had a long walk to our car. When we tried to pay the automated parking machine on the way out, it had trouble reading our ticket. The parking attendant in a nearby booth mumbled something and led us to believe someone was coming to address the problem, but after waiting for a while we finally had to back out of the line and get into the parking attendant line and then wait for her to call someone to figure out what was wrong with our ticket.

On the way home, we stopped by the store for some milk and picked up some chinese takeout at Panda Express. We were home about 7 pm, but it was after 10 before we got things unpacked and settled. We fell into bed not looking forward to facing the 3 remaining work\school days ahead of us before the weekend.