West Cocoa Chat

This is a little post about our trip to Winterfest. It was amazing how it worked out that we were able to get Steven to Winterfest for the very first time and in his senior year of H.S. In the past he was unable to attend due to his commitment to baseball. As I said in a past post, I noticed that unless we made the Championship Game of our Season opening Tournament, I thought we had a chance to get the boy to Winterfest.

It was a financial gamble to be sure because there would be airline tickets involved, rental car, and the usual cost that goes with hanging out with 20,000 teens in Gatlinburg, Tennessee. Oh, not to factor in a possible rain-out day that would push the tournament back into the President’s Day Weekend. Then it happened – rain!

All the games on that Wednesday night were rained out pushing the tournament back one day. This would cause my “cheap” $39 tickets to go up because we would need to change our flights to Saturday instead of Friday and we would now have to fly to Chattanooga instead of Knoxville. My only and I mean my only saving grace was that I had purchased “insurance” at $7.50 a ticket so I would not have to pay the $50 booking fee per ticket to change them. Oh, did I mention that there was a possibility that there would be no seats available on the Chattanooga flight and if there were, there was a limited supply of $39 seats available that at this late date would be long gone? Of course this would be mean that if there were seats available that we would be paying more money for the change in tickets and did I mention that there was a chance of rain for Thursday night as well? Let’s just say that wife was not very happy with me at this point.

O.K, what would you do at this point on Wednesday night?

1. Eat the tickets and the “crow” that would go along with it.

2. Re-read Stephen Covey’s “7 Habits of Highly Effective People.”

3. Gamble again and change the tickets for Saturday’s flight to Chattanooga.

Well it’s a foregone conclusion which option I went with, yes - #3. Things worked out in our favor as the Tournament was bumped back by one day. We played Thursday night and were able to fly out on Saturday.

BTW – I want to give props to (http://www.allegiantair.com/) Allegiant Airline. They were great from the cell phone call that was dropped and the Ticket agent calling me back to finish the change in tickets to the Jet itself. It was new, had extra leg room, it was on time, and it was cheap, well sort of. The only drawback was being a small airline they only fly once a day to your destination. That is why the afternoon flight to Knoxville (less than one hour away from Gatlinburg) on Friday would not work for Saturday.

But God was with us throughout the process and I’ll post some pictures and Winterfest stories including yours truly stopping traffic in the middle of Gatlinburg to allow a certain young man to get in our church bus going the opposite direction.

// posted by cwinwc @ 6:06 AM