Waiting, waiting, waiting. I mentioned The Amazing Race in the last post. While it is continually one of my favorite shows, I could never be a contestant. Besides not being up to the physical demands, I couldn’t handle these airport waits. We’re only here at D/FW for six hours, in relative comfort. I’ve seen too many times the Amazing Race teams “camping out” at a foreign airport, lying on floors, overnight, with no freedom to get up 
and explore for fear of losing their place in line at a ticket office. No thank you. Shortly after our arrival at the gate, Bob and Linda go exploring. They soon return, each with some Ben & Jerry’s ice cream. Hey, it is vacation, even if we haven’t really gone anywhere. (Truth be told, we’re actually farther from Orlando at the moment than when we woke up!) We each take turns either guarding our possessions or exploring the surroundings.
One benefit of our delayed departure is that we can have a substantial lunch, rather than just snacking as we go and hitting fast food on the run, so we scope out the local eateries. 
There are several choices, but we settle on a Fridays. We head there before 11, since none of us ate much breakfast.
Becky and her mom split a pecan-crusted chicken salad and a bowl of broccoli-cheese soup. (Food is always a major part of our vacations, so I report most meals in detail. Get used to it!) Brandon and Benjamin share the huge appetizer sampler, the “Three-For-All,” with fried cheese, buffalo wings, and potato skins. Bob gets his own order of buffalo wings and fries, while I get the skillet chicken & cheese. There’s plenty of garlic and onions in both the 
chicken and the mashed potatoes on my plate. I should be fun to sit near on a plane!
We eat heartily, knowing our supper will be delayed. We “traditionally” (on both previous trips) have eaten at the Tony Roma’s rib place just north of the 
It’s not clear what effect our later arrival will have on our plans, though.
We’re back at our gate for more waiting around noon. This time we have seats facing the window, so we can watch jets taking off and landing. About 30 minutes later I get up to go stretch my legs. While I’m up I check the departures monitor. There’s our (new) flight, American Airlines flight 676, on time for a 2:25 departure… at gate C21???
I check with a nearby gate agent, and sure enough, our departure has been bumped to a different gate, in an entirely different terminal. Good thing I looked! We’re still okay for time, so no pressure to get there, thankfully. We gather our stuff and head back to the SkyLink for another trip around the airport.
We arrive at the new new gate around 1 p.m. Fifty minutes later, boarding begins. Once on the plane, we find that we are in the very last row of seats. 
At least we’re together – not always a certainty when you’re bumped from one flight to another.
The captain announces that we could depart on time, but with an expected tail wind our flight time will be just over two hours, so he’s holding at the gate to allow some connecting bags to be loaded and the line of departing flights ahead of us to clear.
We don’t actually push back from the gate until 2:45, but as the captain predicted, we taxi straight to the runway and start rolling. We’re finally on our way.
I note that we left our house nine hours ago.
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