All of us started our travel to Costa Rica tonight.  Don and I got to O’Hare around 6:30 pm for our 9 pm flight to Houston. All of us were a little worried about all the flooding that happened earlier in the week in Houston but so far our flight and Kelsey’s flight was on time.

Our flight ended up being delayed by a mechanical problem. It was a little worrisome because I thought I heard someone from the plane tell the United worker at the desk that there was “smoke coming from the cockpit”. We were just told that they were looking for a part that needed to be replaced and it would probably take an hour.  I was kind of worried about this. A mechanic finally came and he had a small box and said it would be less than 15 minutes. So we started boarding a little bit before 10 pm. The flight was crowded and we ended up having to check our bags. We were a bit worried though because we wanted our bags in Houston since we had an overnight layover. We told the guy this and he wrote a note on our bags with a napkin. This did not seem like a good way to check bags…but what could we do?

Luckily, the flight to Houston went well. The only weird thing that happened was they gave us these snacks that were labeled as “Asian Snack Mix” and they had pieces of wasabi in them. They were pretty spicy! You could hear people be in shock when they ate those pieces. Pretty funny. We arrived around 12:40 am to Houston and our bags showed up. Then we went to the Hampton Inn near the airport. We had enough points for a free stay here so it seemed like a good idea to get a few hours sleep rather than stay at the airport all night. We would only get about 4 hours of sleep because we were going to take the 5:30 am shuttle back to the airport but it was definitely worth it. While we were sleeping Kelsey was on a flight from Las Vegas to Houston and she will be meeting us in the morning for our flight to Costa Rica.