A bit of catching up!

Last Day of Hols
I forgot to blog about our UK/US celebration of Little Prince's moving in day! We got a Cars shaped Pinata from Walmart and then invited Drama Teen's new Young Man and his sisters round and had half an hour of bashing the Pinata with a Cricket Bat :-) It was very hot and I think most of the sweets got trodden into the ground, but the kids seemed to enjoy bashing away at the Pinata :-) After we'd done that we let Drama Teen go next door with her Young Man (and his sisters as chaperones lol) while we finished packing. Me and Cabbage Queen went to the Post Office to post FIVE boxes of stuff home - I think we did too much shopping!! When it reached lunchtime we had to, sadly, say goodbye to Cabbage Queen and set off to the airport. The goodbyes were hard :-(
Travelling
It was about a three hour drive to the airport, Mr Messy was taking it easy and enjoying driving along the highways. At the airport the Hire Car drop off point was well signposted and easy to find (phew) and once we'd managed to get everything out of the car and onto luggage trollies we set off to find check in. We had to go on a monorail to another terminal, and as we entered that terminal we noticed lots of online check in stations for our airline. We asked the lady at the information desk if we could check in as we didn't have 'proper tickets' just e-tickets and she said "No problem" and pointed us to a check in station where a man assisted us. It was THE easiest check in ever!! Even easier than when we online check-ined for Florida a few years ago!! So, luggage free, we wandered off to find something to eat. We found some comfy chairs, near some interesting looking shops and took turns watching our carry on bags/finding the food courts. While we were doing this Mr Messy checked on our boarding cards and to his horror found we were seated all over the aircraft - each one of us was seated on our own!! Even Little Prince!!! He immediately went off to find someone from our airline to see what we could do. He was told that there were no rules in the US against sitting young children by themselves and that we would just have to go to the boarding gate and see if they could help us!! As soon as the computer screens showed which gate we needed we set off there and sat and waited. It was so stressful. I was so worried about what would happen - and was quite prepared to throw a tantrum and/or refuse to board if we couldn't at least sit with Little Prince and Drama Teen. The mood was lightened a little by Little Prince (wearing his white "good guy" cowboy hat) noticed someone in a black cowboy hat and announced he was a bad guy, and kept trying to shoot him!! As soon as we caught sight of the airline staff approaching I dived to the desk and was first in the queue! I explained to the lady what our problem was, and she asked "Are you the (surname) family?" when I said yes, she told me not to worry she had noticed the problem earlier and had changed our seat allocation! I could have kissed her I was so grateful :-) We were now sitting as a three (at the bulkhead) and a two (across the aisle). What a relief!!!
Flying
We settled ourselves into our seats, I like the bulkhead seats - much more room to spread out! I don't think the lady sharing our row was too chuffed when she saw Little Prince though! Mr Messy, sitting across the aisle, was getting grumpy at the man in front who reclined his seat and took up all Mr Messy's leg room. So in the end he swapped with LMS and sat with me and Little Prince. We had individual TV screens so we let Little Prince chose a film to watch, he chose Kung Fu Panda (again - he watched that on the way out too!!). Once we'd had our meal, which wasn't too bad, we told Little Prince he could watch the end of his film and then it was bedtime. He didn't argue and settled straight down to sleep - what a fab traveller :-) Given all his issues, that we are just learning about, I think he copes marvellously :-) The rest of the flight was uneventful, apart from when I got overheated and felt like I was going to faint! Once I'd managed to get my jacket and blanket off I felt fine, and the stewardesses brought round glasses of water very soon afterwards too, which helped.
Home Again
We got caught in at the back of a HUGE queue for Passport Control and it seemed to take ages to get through. Little Prince made the Passport man smile as he said "Bye Pardner" to him, Little Prince was STILL wearing his cowboy hat!! Once we'd got the luggage I rang the taxi firm and they told me where to go to wait to be picked up. We were all extremely tired and grumpy by this point, and Mr Messy kept questioning where we were going and if I knew waht I was doing, we were both ended up snapping at each other. We seemed to wait for ages for the taxi, and when the driver eventually appeared he said we had to walk to a different part of the carpark as he couldn't fit his minibus in the multistorey part!! Once we were driving Little Prince got quite agitated that we were driving on the "wrong track" (the left side of the road instead of the right as it had been in America!). We assured him it was OK in England and he calmed down.
TO BE CONTINUED :-)