Traveling with a baby: Part II

Subtitle: The airline industry is jacked up

So I mentioned in my previous blog that we didn't fly back home. We ended up renting an SUV for $500 and drove it one way back to Charlotte. It's ridiculous why we had to do that...

When we got tickets for mom, G, and me we were planning on coming back on Saturday so I'd have a day to recouperate before going back to work. We thought that if grandma took a turn for the worst and mom needed to stay and take care of her that we'd just reschedule mom's ticket for a later date and G and I would still come back as planned. Our tickets were almost $1000 for 3 round trip and my aunt made sure to get the $18 insurance on each ticket thinking that would make it no problem to change the flights.
Well, my grandma ended up passing away on Wednesday night. (7 hours after they let her go home from the hospital.) The funeral was scheduled for Saturday morning and there was no way we could make our flight. On Friday when I went to pick up Robert from the airport my aunt called and said Expedia was telling her it would be almost $1000 to change the flights. I tried to talk to a ticket guy in the airport and he told me it would actually be $3000. I didn't have a whole lot of time to figure this out because the viewing was in a few hours...so I decided to just rent a car and drive since it would be cheaper.
*I think it's SO RIDICULOUS that we had to do this. I still haven't written letters to Expedia or United, but you better believe I'm going to.
Thank goodness the guy at Alamo rentals was nice and gave me a free upgrade to a Tahoe. That thing was super nice.
Crazy us decided to leave at 5pm on Saturday and drive through the night so hopefully G would sleep. I must say...except for one meltdown at dinner time he did really well. However, we were so tired that we had to stop several times for potty, caffeine, and stretch breaks...plus a 2 hour nap in a hotel parking lot. It took us almost 24 hours to get home!
I thank God for letting me survive those trips...and guess what...in June we're driving BACK to NY for the burial and a family reunion! Yikes!