So Long DC/NC, Hello Greece

Here’s a long trip report about our recent visit to the east coast.

Thursday
We grabbed dinner at the MPLS airport and arrived in DC around 1030 pm.  A quick metro trip to our friend’s apartment where we dropped our bags and then headed out for a little walking tour around the White House and Washington Monument area.  Headed to bed right around 2 am (that’s real late for us!) 

Spent:  $20 bag fee, $16 dinner at airport, $10 metro passes

Friday
Woke up bright and early and headed to a bakery/cafe for breakfast ($9).  Took the metro out to the suburbs to pick up friend’s car and headed for North Carolina.  We got stuck in traffic north of Richmond, but thankfully we had my Dad’s GPS which saved us time by providing an alternate route.  After 6 long hours, we arrived in Durham.  We bought dinner, checked in at our hotel and then over to campus to meet up with everyone else for homecoming events.

Spent:  $9 for breakfast, $27 for dinner, $65 for our half of the hotel room

Saturday
Another morning, another bakery stop ($6).  We spent the morning touring campus and Bird spent it reminiscing.  I bought an obligatory t-shirt in the campus store for $12.  Then we headed to Raleigh to meet our friend’s grandparents for lunch.  After that we headed back up to Chapel Hill to visit the UNC campus.  From there, it was back to Durham for a birthday party.  The party was at a local restaurant which set us back $32.  After the party we headed back to Raleigh to spend the night at the grandparent’s house.  I do love me some free lodging while traveling.  All in all Saturday was a crazy day and I hit all three points of the Research Triangle.

Spent:  $6 for breakfast, $12 for T-shirt, $32 for dinner

Sunday
We met all our friends back in Durham for brunch on Sunday morning.  It was bittersweet because we were all heading home to our respective corners of the country.  But we had a good time and then loaded into the car and headed back to DC to catch our flight home.  We stopped in the DC suburbs to grab a bite to eat before our friend dropped us off at Dulles.

It was at this point that the real fun began!  Our 630 pm flight was delayed to 8 pm and we were connecting in Atlanta so there wasn’t a lot we could do but hope that everything would work out.  We sat around the airport for a while and eventually got loaded onto our plane only to have them tell us while we were taxiing on the tarmac that Atlanta was delaying us longer because of bad weather.  So we sat on the tarmac for another 20 minutes.  Then when we were finally airborne and approaching Atlanta, the pilot informed us that we needed to circle because Atlanta was still delaying us.  So another 30 minutes in the air.  We finally landed around 11 pm (originally we should have been back to MPLS by 1030 pm) and were told to head for gate D2 for our connecting flight.  Figuring that everything must have been delayed, we took off running.  Several sweaty minutes later we arrive to find our flight long gone.  So we are stuck in Atlanta for the night.  AirTran scheduled us for the next available flight (9 pm the next night! what!?!?!) and we also got a voucher for a discounted hotel room which eventually cost us $66. 

Spent:  $15 for brunch, $20 for gas money, $10 for dinner, $15 bag fee, $66 hotel (plus $17 for lunch at the airport on monday)

Long story short we made an earlier flight as standby passengers and made it home to Minneapolis by 330 Monday afternoon and it never felt so good to be back! 

Total trip expenses*:  $341.83

*Not including our airfare since we paid that back in June.

And it would have been only $258.39 if the weather wouldn’t have screwed us all up.  On the bright side, I did get to miss another whole day of work!

I transferred $350 over from the travel fund to pay for the weekend’s expenses.  I also transferred $2,000 over from the travel fund to prepare for our upcoming trip to Greece.  Here’s hoping we don’t run into any problems on our next trip!  We leave Friday morning!