'How Terrorists Screwed My Travel Plans,' and Other Holidays Adventures

Post-Christmas time is here again, folks...

How was your Christmas? Awesome? Ours was. This year, the Houghs embarked on an awesome cross-continental adventure - we got to fly home to Michigan for a nine-day, winterland tour-de-force. Loads of fun. We got to spend a lot of time with family, got to catch up with old high school and college buddies, and were able to enjoy all of the old favorites around central Michigan (Buccelli's pizza, local townie bars, snow, etc.).

As usual, the Houghs (specifically Dad, Cindy, and yours truly) took way more pictures that probably necessary. We didn't quite hit the Eight Point Lake typical count of 1200 - 1300 pictures for the week, but I think we crossed 800. As such, I didn't feel like hand-picking a ton of them to post up on here. Again, what's easier for me, is just to provide you with the link where you can view an existing web gallery of our family's vacation up north.


Click here to check 'em out.


It was a good trip, and definitely one of the high points of our year. I managed to squeeze in time for the ol' high school crew, was able to get tattoos done with my brother Chris, got to pub crawl Clare, MI. with the infamous Sausage Pad, see all sides of my family, and still had down time in order to chill by a fire, sip 'nog, and jam out to the Vince Guaraldi Trio's Christmas album. All in all, nine just-about-perfect days at home.

Alas, as is typically the case, the vacation had to come to an end. What made our particular venture back home all the more excruciating was the fact that terrorists decided to screw around with my travel plans.

As we all know by now, some Nigerian idiot decided to pack plastic explosives (or whatever it was) in his underpants and try and blow up a plane heading from Amsterdam to Detroit. The exact same airport we would be flying out of two days later.

(Why he was trying to blow up good ol' Detroit, MI. - a city that's more or less already a smoking crater anyway - I have not a clue.)

Anyway, his botched suicide-bombing attempt more or less meant that we had to stand around in pain-in-the-ass lines even longer, and had to deal with heightened security (orange level! gasp!).

Running the airport gauntlet with a pregnant woman and a toddler is just as much fun as it sounds, folks.

News cameras felt it necessary to stick video cameras in people's faces throughout the long lines, which is like the last thing you want to endure after lugging around fifty pound suitcases whilst placating a toddler in the middle of a freak-out. A couple of these newsies even felt it necessary to videotape our daughter as she played around with a suitcase on the floor while we were in line. I didn't know they could do that without offering us a consent form or something. I mean, not that I really minded all that much, but I do enjoy the occasional form-signing. Makes me feel important.

So in conclusion, the Houghs had a good time in Michigan for the Holidays, and are looking forward to it again next year. Only next year, we'll have a second kid (hopefully a boy), and will be forced to make the 1300 mile overland trek - through the Deep South, over the Mountains, and up through the Midwest - in our family's Battle Wagon, as neither Kris nor myself feels like forking out an additional $300 for a third plane ticket (Alayna will need one by then). I'm sure that'll be an awesome car trip.

pfft...

- Brian