Oklahoma Trip

*I failed to mention that the reason we didn't go to MSU was the price. It was way too expensive to go, however nice it would have been to live that close to family*
When Charlie got an interview at OSU, we decided to make a trip out of it and have everyone go. We got plane tickets, which turned out to be extremely expensive. Apparently, the price shoots up the closer you get to the travel date. If we would have known about a week earlier that he would have an interview, we could have got the tickets at about half the price. We left one afternoon and stayed in Denver so we could get up for our flight the next morning. We stopped at a park for a little while since the weather had been so awful in Laramie that Sam hadn't had a chance to be outside very much. He got very upset when we had to leave.



We stayed at Charlie's cousin's place. She had a cat the Sam became quite attached to. He followed her around everywhere and tried to catch the cat on camera. He was somewhat successful.
Here he is saying goodbye to her the next morning.
Now here's where the real adventure begins. We left to the airport around 8 in the morning, giving us about 3 hours to get to the airport and through security. We didn't take into account the amount of time it would take to get through security (about 2 hours) and to our gate. For some reason we had it in our head that our flight left at 10:45, when in reality, it left closer to 10. We got to the gate just in time for the plane to begin leaving the gate. We missed our flight by about 5 minutes. So we headed over to Customer Service to see what we could do. They were able to change our tickets to a later flight, but it would cost $75 extra per ticket. Plus, the next flight that had seats available was at 9 that night. So we had to spend the entire day in the airport. Sam had quite a bit of fun running up and down the moving sidewalks. I'm surprised he was able to keep going for so long. Charlie and I had to keep switching off because we kept getting tired from chasing him.
Sadly, I didn't get my camera out for the entire rest of the trip.

Missing our flight also meant that Charlie would have to interview for another school over the phone at the airport. Many of the schools had their interviews schedule for the same day, and since we had already bought our plane tickets for OSU, that is the school we actually visited. MSU agreed to do a phone interview with Charlie. I don't know how many people can say that they interviewed for grad school in an airport :)

The time finally arrived when our plane was supposed to leave. But no plane arrived. The plane was delayed for no apparent reason. We waited an additional 35 minutes for the plane to arrive. Now, had this happened with our original flight, we would have been able to catch the flight. We finally boarded and took off. Now our concern was this: We were renting a car when we got to Oklahoma. Unfortunately, the car rental agency closed at midnight, and we were due to arrive about 11:50. We were now facing the fact that we may not be able to rent a car. We decided the best action would be to have Charlie quickly leave the plane when it landed and run to the car rental agency, leaving me with Sam and all our carry-on luggage, which consisted of 2 small suitcases, the diaper bag, another small bag, and the laptop. Luckily, Charlie was able to take one of the bags and the laptop, or else I don't know if I would have been able to get everything. It wouldn't have been too much of a problem, but Sam crashed and fell asleep with about 10 minutes left on the flight, and he refused to wake up.

Charlie was able to get a car, and we were on our way to our hotel, over an hour away. That's about the time I realized I hadn't packed the charger for the Garmin. We really didn't want to be in Oklahoma without any GPS, so we took off to find a Walmart. What we didn't know was that Oklahoma doesn't seem to have any supercenters, only "Neighborhood Markets," which only sold food. We finally found one and bought a new Garmin. We set out on our way. We arrived at our hotel around 2:30 am. I don't know how Charlie did so well in his interview, which was at 8 in the morning (so he was running on about 4 hours of sleep), but he must have done really well, because they accepted him a few days later. Our trip home was much less eventful. Our plane left at 2 in the afternoon, and we didn't want a repeat of what had already happened, so we left at about 8 in the morning. What we didn't take into account how much smaller the OK airport was compared to Denver. It took us maybe 20 minutes to get through security and find our gate. So we had probably about 5 hours to kill before our plane left. We boarded our plane without incident.


Here's what Sam considered highlights of the plane ride: Daddy could sit next to us since there were only 2 seats on each side of the isle.

What can I say, it had been a VERY VERY long couple of days.
Here's the pocket with all the safety info and the in flight magazine.
Here's what the seat looked like.
This is the view. Sam had to really stretch to see out the window.
Sam also thoroughly enjoyed the juice and cookies that were served :)

After Charlie was accepted to OSU, we began to pray about which place we should go. We didn't really feel one would be better than the other, so we just did a basic pros/cons about each. In Oklahoma, we could get a 4 bedroom house with a big fenced-in yard for about the same as our 2 bedroom apartment costs right now. The school itself was also cheaper (They were giving Charlie a really good scholarship which would pay for 9 of his credits each semester and give in-state tuition rates for the remaining credits). The awesome weather was also a plus. It rained when we had been in Oklahoma earlier, and apparently that had been a cold front. So we decided to take another trip to Oklahoma to find housing. We drove this time to avoid another airport fiasco, also to see how bad the trip would actually be. There was a really nice guy who was renting the 4-bedroom house that we were interested in. He used to run a bed and breakfast, so he let us stay in one of the places for free. He also had a lot of animals around that Sam had quite a bit of fun looking at. One day, he even got the chance to feed them. It was fairly entertaining to watch.
Sam kept getting mad at the goats because they would try to eat the food before he was able to get it in his hands :)
I've got to say, the house was amazing. It was being completely remodeled and was perfect for what we wanted. It was in a quiet area and it felt like you didn't have any neighbors at all. Having this guy for a landlord would have been awesome too. That's about the time we found out that we wouldn't be able to get the same housing assistance with a 4 bedroom house. The Housing Authority would only allow us to get a 2 bedroom with the size of family we have. It didn't matter that the house cost the same amount as a 2 bedroom apartment. It was still extremely tempting to just pay completely out of pocket, but it would have added on about $20,000 more in student loans over the course of the 2 years we would have been there. We couldn't find any other housing that we liked, and we didn't really want to. One of the reasons for moving to Oklahoma was to move up a little bit, get a bigger place. If we would be stuck with exactly what we already have, would it really be worth it? In the end, we decided to stay where we are, which made our family pretty happy, except for Cassandra :) I'm still sorry about that. We would have been fairly close and we could have spent a bit of time together, but since we couldn't find any housing, there was no way we could leave.

I still lay awake some nights, thinking of that newly remodeled, 4 bedroom house with a big fenced in yard and wonder what it could have been like... *sigh*... Oh well, the drive was way too long anyway.