Why not to set your alarm at 10 pm on St. Patrick's Day if you actually intend be somewhere...

Every time my dad has an early flight, he begins to joke the night before "So we should leave for the airport NOW." If he had his way, he'd literally be at the airport for 4-5 hours before a flight, killing time there just to be on the safe side rather than running through the airport. Fortunately my mom was always the normalizing influence here, but I can't remember a time in my life traveling with my family I was ever less than an hour and a half - bare minimum - early for a flight. AFTER getting through security.

As much of a pain as I found this when I was younger, it invariably sunk into my skin and became something I made an unconscious habit of as I got older - last Thanksgiving, I was carrying on my bag, had already checked in for my flight, and found myself panicking on Super Shuttle (the first and LAST time I actually trusted them, but that's a different story) because for my 7:55 am flight, we were still not en route to the airport. It was 5:30 in the morning when I though this.

I'm not quite my father's daughter, but I do like to have about an hour to an hour and a half after my time in security to settle, get a coffee, a water, some magazines, etc. So you can imagine how unhappy a camper I was this morning when I arrived at the airport when my flight was BOARDING. Again, carrying on my bag and already checked in, so for most people this would've been an unfortunate oversight, but for yours truly it was a cause for actual panic. Somehow in a foolish haze of last night's St. Patty's Day festivities, I felt that 7:30 would be an appropriate wakeup time, rather than, as it ACTUALLY was, an appropriate time to leave for the airport. So at 8:18, still on the freeway headed for JFK, I was beginning to SERIOUSLY kick my own ass for what would probably be a missed flight.

Now, fortunately, I write this happily parked in my bedroom at home in California, having made my flight by the skin of my teeth (no seriously, I literally ran to get on the plane). But I've proven to myself that I will never, ever, ever be able to be one of those kind of travellers. Yeesh.

But all told, it followed a particularly successful St. Patrick's Day which included far too much debauchery in the name of being Irish whilst sunbathing on my porch in the gorgeous 70 degree weather and later being able to traipse around New York the entire night at a comfortable temperature, since I didn't in fact miss the flight it's very hard to feel bad about this at present.

And now I have three gorgeous days of blissful relaxation in the California sunshine, and plans to go to the beach tomorrow. I return to my insanely stressful life Monday night, but for now? Life is good. Life is really, really good.