One of the downside sometimes of getting free flights is that they tend to happen at odd times. In this case, our flight to Seattle for our Alaska cruise was scheduled to leave Dulles at 7:00 am. The night before our flight, I got an alert from United that our flight would be delayed by 30 minutes. The message said that we should still show up on time, so that is what we planned on.
For the summer of 2019, we had originally decided on a 10-night Mediterranean cruise on the Disney Magic. As we got into the Summer of 2018, we came to the conclusion that we couldn’t make the cruise work with our schedule and our budget. We already had a few cruises in the books that we had to pay for as well as a lot going on that would make it hard to plan a Europe trip. Canceling that cruise was a huge burden lifted off our shoulders.
The travel day for our Spring Break cruise quickly approached. Our flight on United Airlines was leaving Dulles at 8:15 am, so our scheduled taxi picked us up at 6 am. We arrived quickly at Dulles ready to check in for our flight (really just drop off the bags since we checked in online). The ticket area was really busy, probably because of Spring Break travelers like ourselves. We got our bags dropped off and headed for the TSA Pre Check line. The line was slightly backed up, but we managed to clear it without anyone getting pulled aside for additional screening, which might be a first. On the way to our gate, we stopped for a free breakfast using our Priority Pass from our Hilton Aspire Cards. We ended up pushing up against our departure time, so we had to cut breakfast short so we could get to our gate before boarding. We walked over to our gate (which was nearby) and boarding started ten minutes later.