Getting up this morning, I was paranoid by even the thought of missing our flight, so in the morning I was quick to get ready. For our last day we decided to go to Hollywood. We scheduled a horseback riding thing in Hollywood Hills for 11am. They were set for every hour. I thought 9am would be impossible, and that 10am would still be pushing it, for us to get there in time with getting ready and LA traffic, so we settled for 11am which may have been our first mistake. Online when I was making reservations, you could do a 1 hour reservation or a 2 hour reservation. I went with the 1 hour, thinking we would get done by noon and have a little time to explore Hollywood before returning our rental car and getting to the airport. We got to the horse ranch, at 10:40am which gave us plenty of time to fill out the safety forms, and get the equipment. (back to the drama later.) We were then assigned horses and started our ride. Shayna's horse decided to rebel and went far away from all the horses to eat grass, and my horse ended up getting bit by another horse so it got away from that one. Before we started our journey our instructors told us that the horses felt safest walking on the edge of cliffs. This was a little frightening, but I thought as long as my horse feels safe, I guess that's all that matters. It turned out not to be as scary as they made it seem. We were never actually in danger of falling down a cliff. I had to keep my horse in line, because it would either walk too slowly (don't blame him it was a steep cliff) or try to cut in line. At the beginning of the ride, you walk past a place with a view of the Hollywood sign. But you could also see LA and the Griffith Observatory in the distance most of the walk, which was cool. I appreciated the fact that the tour guides took out time to get a couple of picture of everyone while riding their horses. On the way back to the stable my horse ended up tripping but caught his balance again while going down the hill, which was a little terrifying. When we did return to the stable there were ducks in the water trough, and my horse wanted to drink the water, but the tour guides said that it wasn't a good idea, so I had to pull him away from the trough which didn't make him very happy. (My horses name was Rocky.).
When we got back to the car after horseback riding, I noticed it was 12:40. The horseback riding had gone 40 minutes longer that it said it would. Shayna said that we didn't actually start riding until 11:20 which is why it was so late. This made me stressed out knowing we had a lot less time afterwards then we had figured. Which is reason 1 we probably missed our flight. We decided to get lunch in Hollywood quick and then go drop off our car before heading to the airport. We managed to get free parking again because it was a holiday (Columbus Day?). We got there and ate lunch which takes us to around 1:30, with our flight leaving at 3:15. I was still incredibly nervous about missing the flight. We ended up taking the leftovers with to eat later in the airport (bc we would have time :) ) We were going to leave....but our restaurant was across the street from a huge record store that people had recommended me to go to, Amoeba. Now I know I didn't have a lot of time, so I rushed through that store fairly quickly. Only checking out the things I wanted too, and none of the extra things. We were in there 7 minutes tops, as I am efficient in a time crunch or so I thought. I purchased two Beatles records and we were on our way. This is reason 2 on why we missed our flight, had we just skipped Amoeba we would have had a couple more minutes at least. We saw a couple Hollywood stars on the way back to our car.
Reason #3 happens when we stop to get gas, to make sure our rental car has a full tank. Neither of my cards worked when I scanned them outside, so the monitor told me to see the cashier. I went in by the cashier and he said that my card worked and to go out and try again. (Like we had time). So I went out and again both of my cards were declined so I rushed back into the gas station, he then says I can select an amount and that's how much gas would go in, so I said $30 worth. I pumped $30 worth and turned on the car and realized it wasn't a full tank, so I ran back inside. I figured $10 more would be enough, but who could be sure. So I asked him while breaking down crying, (which probably wasted more time). He was foreign and very calm and told me to not get upset over it and be accepting of the stress. I told him how I was afraid we'd miss our flight since it was now 2:15. He assured me that even if that happened the airport would help me, and there would be plenty of flights to get me home that night, for a low cost. (He was wrong). It turns out $10 was enough, and we continued our journey.
Reason #4 and the final reason we missed our flight is because our specific rental company we used for our car had two locations. One in Beverly Hills and one next to the airport. However when you looked up Black and White Rental, only the Beverly Hills address showed up. I didn't know the area to well, but I noticed we got to the rental place pretty quickly after first arriving, so I figured there had to be a closer location to LAX, and assumed LAX and Beverly Hills weren't close to each other. I figured it must be my mistake after Shayna said it was the only location she could find on Google Maps. (Not blaming her for us missing our flight, but Google :P) So we drove to the Beverly Hills location, and I soon began to realize, I recognized none of this. Sure enough, the Beverly Hills building looked different then the one we had been too. We decided to call and ask if we could just drop off the rental at that location, but they said it wouldn't probably save any time to do that, and we'd still have to Uber to LAX, so we decided to drive to the correct location a half hour away. It was 2:30 when we got to the Beverly Hills location. At this point, most hope had left me that we would make our flight. There was still a little hope that God would cause a flight delay, but as you can tell by the title that didn't happen. We returned the car then headed back to LAX where we talked to the airport staff about our options. There were 3
1) Buy a whole new ticket and switch over to American Airlines for $372, but make it back to WI that night like we had planned.
2) Fly out the next day with Spirit Airlines again with a $100 fee since it wasn't our original flight, and a layover in Atlanta, not getting to Chicago until 9:30pm the next night.
3) Flying out on Wednesday with Spirit Airlines.
Since all of the options sucked, I broke down again and cried at the airport. Shayna's parents wanted us to choose Option 1 so that we would get home that night, however my mom thought Option 2 would be best, which is what we ended up choosing. $400 extra unexpected isn't a fun idea. However we still needed to pay the $100 fee to switch flights, and a fee to stay at the hotel for the night. It wasn't all bad though because we got an extra night in LA, and our hotel had a hot tub which I utilized. We bought from a hotel that had a shuttle from LAX, however the shuttle only came once an hour so we had to wait around 40minutes to be picked up, but at last we got to our hotel. I looked at footage from the concert the night before as Shayna slept off the stress with a long nap.
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