Virginia, Monkeys, Dominoes

I haven't posted in a while and I feel like this is pretty normal behavior for me. I start something that I feel I'll do fairly consistently only to do it as sporadically as buckshot. Anyway, by the title you may be wondering what the heck I'm talking about. Lisa and I went to visit her Grandmother and Uncle in Virginia last weekend and it was alot of fun.

We flew from JAX to ATL and then to Richmond. Before leaving JAX we got delayed by 2 hours because of the storm in Chi-town where over 400 flights were canceled which ended up delaying so many flights across the country. After we got to ATL we were so short on time that we got off the plane just to walk to the next gate and start boarding again and you know what that means...yup, we got on the next plane but our luggage didn't. We arrived in Richmond and went to the luggage carousel and waited...and waited...and waited...and then got smart and went to Air Tran's Customer Service desk but of course no one was there. We decided to go to the desk upstairs and find out what we needed to do just to be told that we needed to go back down to the customer service desk and wait for the person in charge to get back. So we did just that only to find that an angry mob had now gathered at the desk with no Air Tran rep manning their post. By now these folks are ticked off and listing the long list of reasons why they have the right to be upset, which is true they have every right to be upset but what they failed to notice was that no one else cared that they had any reason or no reason! We wait some more and then the carousel turns back on and I rush over to plead with the carousel god to spew our luggage from its bowels but that wasn't happening. I go back to our position in line at the customer service desk and then an announcement comes over the loud speaker, that wasn't very loud I might add, informing us to go back up to the check in desk on the floor above us. Like load-less pack mules we scurry up the escalators mumbling to ourselves that they are just going to tell us to go back downstairs once we get up there. We arrive and to our surprise the same gentleman who previously told us to wait downstairs says "You'll have to go wait downstairs at customer service I can't handle your claim here." Lisa's uncle is not happy at this point but before he can rip into the guy too much another young kid comes to the desk and says he'll take care of us. We fill out the claim form and let him know that our luggage is black like everyone else in the airport and we're finally off to have dinner.

Our luggage arrived the next morning but it was pretty crappy not having our toothbrushes and all that jazz for the first night. Lisa and I started playing dominoes one of the nights and she blew me out of the water! I didn't even stand a chance. I'm talking over 300 points difference. I made up for it the following night when we played with her mom, aunt, and cousin and I won. When we got back home we had to immediately go and get our own set of Cardinal Mexican Train Dominoes. We love it and have found our new game of choice.

On Monday, New Year's Eve, before we left to come back home, we got to go to the zoo that is right next door to Lisa's Uncle Joel's house. Joel is the Bishop of the ward up there in Chesterfield county and a member of the ward owns the Metro Richmond Zoo. My love for monkeys was found out and arrangements were made for us to be able to meet the young Orangutan Farley who is being raised in the families house right now. The intention was to let us hold Farley but he was too shy to let anyone other than the Zoo keeper's son hold him. We all got to take some good pictures of him so we left pretty satisfied. We walked around the zoo for about an hour and a half after that and saw about 30 different species of monkeys, zebra, lions, rhinos, tigers, antelope, Asiatic bears, elk, deer, penguins, warthogs, and giraffe. We were able to hand feed the giraffe and it was pretty cool. They have long gross tongues that were like go-go-gadget instruments that picked up food about a foot away. We got plenty of pictures so we're going to look through them and hopefully get a few of them framed.

All in all it was a fun trip that helped me pack on a few more pounds before 2008!