Our trip was overall pretty good! Some bumps here and there though. I think I'll organize my pictures soon so I can get them added to this thread. But for now...I'll just start by writing about our first day - just a travel day and definitely our worst day.
Day 1 - Sunday, December 7th
First, I'll mention that the night before our trip, our son got really upset. If you're new here and didn't ready any earlier stuff - our son is 12 years old, autistic, and minimally verbal. So the night before, he says "road trip" in an excited voice. I reminded him that we're flying this time. It's been on his schedule as flying and we've mentioned it a lot so I'm not sure why he said road trip. So he gets super sad and this made me very stressed out. It was a rough evening.
The morning of the trip arrives and he's thankfully in better spirits and seemed pretty excited. Oh, another thing about my son...lately, he's been taking FOR-EV-ER to eat at mealtimes. So he has his breakfast around 7am but didn't fully finish until almost 8:30. Not great when we were essentially planning to eat an early lunch before takeoff. (This will be possibly relevant later....)
We got to the airport at 9:45. Got our bags checked and everything really quickly. Faster than we planned. Our airport is currently undergoing construction and food options are limited. We still wanted to just eat something before boarding though since food at our layover airport (Phoenix) isn't great either and we would be limited on time.
We brought some food from home for our son and myself and my husband grabbed a pretty terrible sandwich at the airport. I didn't expect our son to eat much but he actually ate a lot of what I brought (which was essentially some things we pack in his school lunch - green pepper "slices", grapes, pretzels, yogurt.) Once done, we headed through TSA pre-check, which was fast.
Our flight boarded on time. The flight was 2 and a half hours or so. Our son did well. Happy and just relaxed.
Once we got to Phoenix, he started to seem kind of "blah." He can't really tell us how he feels so it's all a guessing game. I was hoping he was just tired or something. Our next flight boarded on time. The plane was much hotter than the last one. Thankfully, it was a shorter flight, about an hour and a half, I think.
Unfortunately, he didn't perk up on the flight. He just seemed more and more "blah." We're finally getting close to landing at John Wayne airport....and he looks like he's going to throw up. We quickly grabbed a bag and took his mask off. Yep....he threw up. Only a little but I felt so bad for him. He was looking out the window a lot during the decent as we tilted back and forth a lot so we thought maybe it was from that, combined with how hot the airplane was and the fact that he ate so much the first part of the day.
I was so happy to be on the ground and off the plane at that point! We quickly got our bags and headed to the ride share area to get an Uber to the hotel. I was so stressed he'd throw up again in the car! Thankfully, that didn't happen.
Got to the hotel and we still hadn't been assigned a room so we went to the front desk. It was about 4pm and I was so thankful they said our room was ready! Room 4504.
As we were unpacking and settling in, our son ended up throwing up again. So we just relaxed for a bit to see how things would go for the evening. One problem is that he is VERY stuck on routine and schedule. So even when he's sick at home, he still wants to eat because it's part of the routine. At home, it's easier to just give him some soup or something. But sadly, our grocery delivery hadn't arrived (I did add soup to it at the last minute.) Then...he started asking for dinner. Ugh.
The plan had been to get pizza at Napolini so we just decided to go grab some and hopefully he wouldn't force himself to eat any. The line there was insanely long and took forever. But thankfully we made it back to our room safely. He was actually in a fairly chipper mood at this point so we were hoping maybe it really was just from the flight!
Sadly...he DID end up eating some pizza.....and shortly after...threw it all up. Then he took a quick shower and fell asleep at 8:00.
Our grocery delivery was supposed to arrive between 6-8pm. It didn't arrive until 9:30. I wasn't happy about this at all! But once it finally got there, my husband and I decided to call it an early night as well.
Oh wait...one good thing! Around 8:30, we got a knock on the door and it was a woman with a little Mickey cake on a tray. I thought she had the wrong room. But nope! It was a surprise from a friend of ours. Very thoughtful and did put a positive ending on a not-so-great day. She even included a small watercolor painting she made for us. So sweet!
So yeah...that was our travel day. Did I ever mention how much I HATE flying and the stress of it all? I much prefer the 3-day drive to California!
