A First Timer's Trip, August 4-12
Posted: Wed Aug 23, 2017 3:09 pm
Hi there. I just looked it up and I joined this board in 2008 (pardon the stupid name, my real name is Eileen ). I suppose I joined after our family trip to Yellowstone/GTNP in 2007, thinking this would be our next "big" trip. Well as it turned out, it took a few years. . My husband and I actually took trips to Yosemite/Big Sur and back to Yellowstone/GTNP for our first big "sans kids" trips and Glacier got on the slate again this year, finally. I can't thank the posters here enough for sharing their knowledge and experience. It's immensely helpful.
So here goes. I'm going to start at the beginning even though we don't get to Glacier until Day 2. I guess you never know what might be helpful to someone, even in regard to transportation. Which brings us to Day 1:
Friday 8/4:
PLAN: Travel from Raleigh to Spokane on Southwest, Arrive at Midnight PDT, stay at Spokane Airport Ramada
(side note: after looking and looking at airfare to Kalispell, someone on Trip Advisor pointed out that airfare and car rentals were cheaper to Spokane. Our flights were $384 compared to high $600s to Kalispell and the flights STILL didn't get us into Kalispell until very late on Saturday or required a full day of travel on Friday. We opted to go with SW/Spokane and our rental car was a fair amount cheaper too. We DID upgrade to "early bird check-in" so we could get decent boarding positions and that helped given that we'd be at Sperry when it was time to "check in" for our return flight. I think it was $30/ticket and WORTH IT)
ACTUAL:
Off we went to the airport around 4:30pm for our 6:20pm flight to Spokane with a layover in Denver (traveling Southwest Air). We kicked off our vacation with a beer at bar after checking our luggage and getting thru security. We noticed lots of flight delays but that's not surprising for later afternoon flights in the summer.
Ours was originally not delayed but soon became so. While we waited I checked the status of our DEN-> Spokane flight and realized that was delayed already as well so we had no concerns about missing connections.
During our flight west, it seemed like the plane slowed just after passing over Kansas City (I love how you can use your Google Maps to find where you are even in Airplane Mode) and then we realized the sunset was on the other side of the plane and then back to "correct" side. Hmmmmm. A bit later it seemed to happen again (this time it was the moon).
Here's our flight path via Flight Aware.
Untitled by Eileen Francis, on Flickr
Anyway -- a LONG flight made longer by a ground stop in Denver due to storms and we arrived in Denver around 11pm (I think) and you'd have thought it was 5pm as crowded as it was. Barely able to get "dinner" before the last place serving food closed. We didn't take off until 1am, didn't get into Spokane until 2am local time, didn't get into our room at the Ramada until 3am local time -- which was 6 AM Raleigh time. Meaning we'd been up for 24 hours! Perhaps this Spokane idea wasn't so great.
We fell asleep immediately and I set my alarm for 10am local time just in case we "overslept" (ha).
So here goes. I'm going to start at the beginning even though we don't get to Glacier until Day 2. I guess you never know what might be helpful to someone, even in regard to transportation. Which brings us to Day 1:
Friday 8/4:
PLAN: Travel from Raleigh to Spokane on Southwest, Arrive at Midnight PDT, stay at Spokane Airport Ramada
(side note: after looking and looking at airfare to Kalispell, someone on Trip Advisor pointed out that airfare and car rentals were cheaper to Spokane. Our flights were $384 compared to high $600s to Kalispell and the flights STILL didn't get us into Kalispell until very late on Saturday or required a full day of travel on Friday. We opted to go with SW/Spokane and our rental car was a fair amount cheaper too. We DID upgrade to "early bird check-in" so we could get decent boarding positions and that helped given that we'd be at Sperry when it was time to "check in" for our return flight. I think it was $30/ticket and WORTH IT)
ACTUAL:
Off we went to the airport around 4:30pm for our 6:20pm flight to Spokane with a layover in Denver (traveling Southwest Air). We kicked off our vacation with a beer at bar after checking our luggage and getting thru security. We noticed lots of flight delays but that's not surprising for later afternoon flights in the summer.
Ours was originally not delayed but soon became so. While we waited I checked the status of our DEN-> Spokane flight and realized that was delayed already as well so we had no concerns about missing connections.
During our flight west, it seemed like the plane slowed just after passing over Kansas City (I love how you can use your Google Maps to find where you are even in Airplane Mode) and then we realized the sunset was on the other side of the plane and then back to "correct" side. Hmmmmm. A bit later it seemed to happen again (this time it was the moon).
Here's our flight path via Flight Aware.
Untitled by Eileen Francis, on Flickr
Anyway -- a LONG flight made longer by a ground stop in Denver due to storms and we arrived in Denver around 11pm (I think) and you'd have thought it was 5pm as crowded as it was. Barely able to get "dinner" before the last place serving food closed. We didn't take off until 1am, didn't get into Spokane until 2am local time, didn't get into our room at the Ramada until 3am local time -- which was 6 AM Raleigh time. Meaning we'd been up for 24 hours! Perhaps this Spokane idea wasn't so great.
We fell asleep immediately and I set my alarm for 10am local time just in case we "overslept" (ha).