The last 24 hours in the US, for a while anyway - Part 2

At this point it was pouring rain, and there were two major accidents on the Beltway, that gave us the benefit of heavy traffic. I settled back for the 3 hr trip to Jersey, mentally calculating how much time I might have to stop and have a final visit with DH's grandmother and my best friend Steph and her family. The math was adding up to: not much. Meanwhile, Eliza would not stop crying in the back of the van... driving me absolutely crazy. Except when she stopped, when I panicked that something had happened, like carbon monoxide fumes from the van's exhaust had overwhelmed the kitties, despite the fact we were doing 75 mph on the highway.

We made our first stop at DH's grandmother's house at about 430, staying only a couple of minutes since we still had to unpack the van at Dad's house. We stopped at Dad's house at about 515, when it was raining lightly, and somehow got all the crap out of the van (and me convinced my Dad was going to have a stoke or heart attack any second) in about 45 minutes. I took a shower, he switched the van out with his Cadillac, and we left his place at about 630 to stop at Stephs for just about 5 minutes before we had to leave to get to the airport in Newark.

All I could remember about my instructions were to go to door 3 of terminal C at Newark to drop off the cats. Unfortunately terminal C has an upstairs and a downstairs for international and domestic departures respectively. We drove around the airport twice looking for the Continental Quickpac desk before I spotted it. That's about the same time that the real waterworks began. I took the kitties and my suitcases out of the car, loaded them onto a huge trolley cart, and pushed it over to the Quickpac desk. It was about 745 and it took about 30-40 minutes for them to clear the kitties. I was in full tears-down-my-face mode, worried about them, the paperwork, and that Eliza would never stop crying/meowing/howling until she died from exhaustion. At least the last bit proved to be temporarily untrue, since as soon as she was set on the floor behind the counter she settled into her little bed, just looking around at everything.

It was finally time for me to check myself and my bags in for my flight. It was 830 at this point - my flight was at 1010. There were only two people barely working behind the 20 or so check-in stations. Complete chaos! There were only about 15 people in line ahead of me and I didn't get fully checked in and through security until 915. Boarding for my flight started at 925 according to my pass, I had to find room in the overhead bin for my largish (pushing the limit) carryon suitcase and largish "personal item" (a normal carryon bag - hey, I'm moving!). Not only that, but the whole day I had consumed exactly 1/2 of a 3 day old doughnut and a coffee, so I was in desperate need for food. Thankfully there was a large foodcourt right around the corner from the gate, so I went and bought myself a chicken salad wrap and a bottle of water, ate half the wrap before feeling really ill (nerves... the wrap itself was tasty) and made my way over to the gate, boarding the plane just 5 minutes later.