4/26/08
Soni wanted to go to Arkansas over her school Passover break to see her sisters and the white dogwoods, pink dogwoods, and redbuds that were in bloom now. Kristi arranged for us to get a standby flight on Delta where she works that was scheduled to & from Tulsa on Tue. 4/22 and RTB Thu. 4/24.The trip has now been completed with a few interesting hassles along the way and we both enjoyed it very much. We were bumped from the scheduled flight leaving SLC and were rescheduled at the far extreme gate of SLI on a flight to Kansas City, which we made, had front seats by the bulkhead and were not crowded at all. We had great handicap assisted service when we arrived at KC. There was a wheelchair waiting for Soni where they took us out to the car rental shuttle and drove us over to the rental place. the bus driver had radioed ahead and they even had a wheelchair waiting when we got off the bus.

At the end of the road trip down to Eureka Springs, it became a bit hectic because much of the freeway system had been rebuilt during the past year and our 1-year old GPS did not have the updates, so in some cases it showed us driving across some fields and the highway we were actually on was shown going across our path from left to right. Then as night began to fall and we could not use a map, we just depended totally on Gertrude (as we call the GPS... Gertrude Polly Smith) and it keep getting us closed & closer to Ft. Smith, Arkansas rather than on a route we probably would have taken in the daytime when we could see the map. However, she (Gertrude) finally headed us east in the right direction. The road was extremely steep and crooked all the way, but sometimes we would pass a warning sign that said "Next 6 miles steep and crooked". We weren't sure how it could get any more steep and crooked! We had been talking occasionally on the cell phone to Carol & Nicole who were waiting at the motel in Eureka Springs for us. They had already checked out a key to our room since we would be arriving late. When we finally reached Eureka at 11:30 p.m., we drove from one end of town to the other looking for the motel. We didn't find it, so we tried to call Carol, but our phone had no service in the mountains of Eureka. So we drove back through town again with no luck and then went through a 3rd time. We stopped at an all-night gas station and asked the woman where it was. She wasn't sure but thought it was by a Pizza Hut. We went back the 4th time and couldn't find the Pizza Hut either. We stopped at a motel that seemed like it had someone in the office, but he wasn't interested in giving us any info on another motel. We tried at another motel and spoke with a very nice gentleman that finally gave us some good directions and we rolled in at 12:15.

The weather there was fantastic spring weather even though it was snowing in SLC. Soni was able to enjoy her sisters and the scenery plus it just so happened that Wed. was Aunt Roberta's 91st birthday and we were invited to attend her birthday dinner at a restaurant in Harrison. Soni seemed to really enjoy the visit there.

Since we were scheduled to fly back out of Tulsa on Thur., we had arranged to drop the kansas City car off in Tulsa, however we found out before leaving that we had been bumped from the Tulsa return flight, so we were rebooked at KC and had to drive back to there. We arrived in plenty of time and went to wait at the gate for boarding. We had been there about 5 minutes, when they called final boarding for the 2:00 p.m. flight to SLC. We were booked for the 5:18 p.m. flight that would have arrived here around 7:00. I figured they could tell me how our flight was looking until closer to time for our flight, so I waited til the last person went through and then gave her our 2 Seat Requests and asked her about our flight. Sure enough, she said she couldn't tell yet, but she immediately began pecking away on the computer keyboard and said, "Is this other person here?". I said "Yes, she is sitting right there across the room in the wheelchair." We received 2 boarding passes and were rushed right onto the plane where we obtained the last 2 seats on the plane. It was tight and cramped in row 16 but we made it back to SL before we were even scheduled to leave KC! So we were glad to be able to "hi-jack" the flight before our flight.