"I Am 60" Tour-Day 9- Going Home- June 28, 2017

Unless I am trying to change my body clock to European time, I want no parts of getting up at 3:20 am. However, that's what we did today in order to make our first flight on our trip home. When we left the hotel at 4:03, we had not gotten the requested wake-up call. Good thing we had dependable alarms. There wa a hint of light off to the east.
We drove through mostly empty streets and arrived at Glacier International Airport at 4:18. The odometer read 2908- we'd put 1394 miles on the car since we'd gotten it in Rapid City, South Dakota. Not bad! I dropped my husband and younger daughter at the Delta entrance along with our luggage. My older daughter came with me to the lot at the other end of the terminal for the car rental return.
No one was there, of course. We just found a spot in the Hertz row. We had to write the spot number, the odometer reading and the tank reading on the rental folder. I took pictures as best as I could to have a record that it was returned in good shape. Then, we walked quickly to the terminal and the Hertz desk. I took a picture of the key on top of the folder and then of my daughter's hand putting the lot into the return slot. You cannot be too careful.
At 4:30, I got my suitcase from my husband and got in line to drop it off. I was finished in just 6 minutes. Then, it was time to eat the breakfast food that we'd brought, which we did on the one bench seat near Delta. We even ate up the last of the cream cheese before getting in the TSA line. We were really surprised to see that this little airport with its 5 gates had a Pre-Check line. My younger daughter is the only one of us who has not signed up, but it didn't take her long to get through her line.
We saw that gates 1a-c were assigned to United. Delta was at 2. Alaskan Air and something else were at 3, I believe. We had time to kill, so we looked in the shop before settling in to read. This photo was taken at 5 am and it was a big hit on Facebook:

Here's the sky at 5:28:

And, you know you are pretty far north when it is this light at 5:49:

By then, we were obviously settled into our seats on DL1616 to Salt Lake City. My husband, younger daughter and I were seated together and my older daughter had paid for a better seat farther up front again. The leg space was much better than my first American Airlines flight last week, but the overhead bins were still huge. The plane pushed back at 6:02 am and took off at 6:11. My husband soon had a great view out the window and took this gorgeous shot for me:

It's not a long trip to SLC and we landed at 7:28. We headed for our gate, looking at lunch possibilities along the way. My husband and I looked around in the Utah Market, which was Utah products, not food. I bought a small kachina and a lovely Indian vase, before we did pick up food for the plane. I got a chicken pesto panini and he got a turkey guacamole hand-held.

At 8:55, we had to say good-bye to my older daughter so that she could go to her gate for her plane to D.C. It was so hard to say good-bye; we'd had such a great time together! Plus, I don't get to see her again until Christmas.
Our boarding was delayed because we were waiting for our cabin crew to come from another gate. It turned out hers was delayed due to an equipment issue. Finally at 9:42 am MDT, we were seated on DL2624 to Orlando, in the same configuration as the previous flight. The plane had been scheduled to depart at 9:35, but didn't push back until 9:54. Take off was at 10:10.
During the flight, we ate and watched movies. I watched The Founder about Ray Kroc and was almost finished A Dog's Purpose, when we landed at 3:50 pm EDT. It didn't take very long to get our luggage, but we had to walk almost the entire length of the terminal to get to the shuttle to Fast Park, where my husband had left his car. We were on the shuttle at 4:38 and the guy dropped us right in front of his car at 4:51. They gave us free, cold water as we exited, which was very nice.
We dropped our daughter off at her apartment and went to get dinner for ourselves, because there had been a bad accident and back-up on the 417 and I 4 is awful at that hour. There was a Tijuana Flats nearby, which was fine because I hadn't had Mexican food the entire trip. We got a salad bowl and a quesadilla. They were okay, but not as good as the one near us.

After dinner, we drove the much calmer roads home.
It was absolutely the 60th birthday trip I'd hoped for. Everything had gone well; everybody had a great time. My family was able to be there for me. What more could I ask for?