when your plans flop

hey guys, welcome back! sorry that I'm posting this on a tuesday -- I do my best to stick with the social media schedules I set out for myself (monday blog posts and tuesday / friday youtube videos), but sometimes life happens 🙃 and yesterday that was us traveling all day and not having an outlet to charge my laptop! I usually share any changes to posting schedules on my instagram story, so that's the best place to stay up to date :)

alrighty, anyways, in today's post I want to share about a character building experience Justen and I had this weekend when my plans for our travels completely fell apart...

we were supposed to be in d.c. for my graduation wednesday – friday and in l.a. for disney + my little sister's graduation friday – monday. my parents joined us in d.c. and then were going to meet us in california. I had grand plans to explore d.c. with my parents and Justen on thursday and then had a whole day at disneyland planned for us on saturday – rides and food bucket list, photos list, vlog plans and all. and pretty much all of it fell through 😂

wednesday night our flight got delayed 5 hours, so we spent our evening in the chicago midway airport -- if you know, you know ... that airport is nasty. I have no idea why our flight plan took us to chicago on our way to d.c., but we were trying to save some money 😂 we were supposed to get together with my college friend who lives in d.c. for dinner, but we got in so late that night that we ended up going straight to bed.

we were thankfully able to have my friend join us the following night for dinner with my parents, but the entire day leading up to that was the ~chaos express~ trying to get errands done, figure out logistics for graduation, squeeze in time with family, and prepare for the next day of travel. needless to say, exploring d.c. musuems did not happen.

after graduation friday morning (which was so fun and sweet), we headed to the DCA airport expecting to fly from d.c. to houston and then houston to LAX, getting in around 11 pm california time... what actually happened was an almost comical failure of every leg of that trip to where we ended up having delay after delay, landing in another city because we ran out of fuel, landing late in houston because we had to circle down towards mexico to get around bad weather, missed our connection to LAX, and the next flight they could book us on was for 4 pm the following day.

houston was experiencing a horrible storm (thankfully everyone we know there is okay!), so no hotels / motels had space and the only ones available were in really unsafe areas of the city. we opted to sleep in the airport, which meant curling up on the floor and hoping for the best. we were able to get on an earlier flight around 11 am the next day (thankful for the kind southwest agents who helped us!!) but got delayed again and ended up not getting to california until around 3 or 4 pm, meaning we had missed our entire day at disneyland.

now as I usually say in my blog posts when I write about life lessons I'm learning, a lot of these experiences are pretty small compared to the big life challenges we all face at some point. missing a flight, sleeping in an airport, not getting to go to disney -- these are all objectively small things and privileges to have even been able to do.

but I really think life is in the small things. the giant trials we go through like illness, death of a loved one, failure, rejection, job losses, etc. are usually few and far between, scattered throughout our lives. they leave lasting marks, for sure, and usually come with monumental growth and life change. but the grand majority of our lives are spent in the smaller day-to-day moments, and I think that's where we often miss both great joy and great growth.

my plans for my life have flopped in both major and minor ways. I once was convinced I would marry my college boyfriend, go to Vanderbilt nursing school, and live in nashville for the rest of my life. and life looks completely different than that!! but that perspective came years after seeing the promises God had on my life come to fruition. sometimes we don't see shift in those giant life changes until way later.

but in the small things, we can learn quickly and learn well if we pay attention. if we wait around for another big life change to grow and be formed, we miss out on all the daily little lessons unfolding in front of us!

so that's what happened to me this weekend -- my cute little disneyland dreams were replaced with a quick 3 hour trip to disney where we rode one ride (pirates! a good choice haha), ate dinner, and watched the fireworks. and you know what? it was wonderful. we were definitely pretty sad to miss the daytime hangs with my family (they didn't join for the evening), but our disney date night as we called it became really sweet and intentional. my phone had died so I left it at the hotel, and I ended up putting my camera up for most of the evening because I wanted to soak up time with Justen and really experience his first day (well, night) at disney. the disney vlog may be worse because of it, but we have sweet memories that only we got to experience and that was really special💖

we ended up having great quality time with my family the next day and played an epic game of a card game that we call "the bean game" by the pool which was hilarious especially with some cocktails throw in there, haha. my parents remarked that they wouldn't have handled the travel craziness as well as we did–and honestly it was all Justen because I definitely had some grumpy breakdowns at the airport–but we really did keep a good attitude and laughed about it all the whole weekend. going through those ups and downs and learning the little life lessons is a lot more fun with your best friend :)

if you've learned a similar lesson like this, i'd love to hear about it! feel free to leave a comment below or send me a DM or text. I love hearing from y'all!

also the graduation vlog is here! part 2 (california half of the trip) will be up on friday 🤗

much love,

emily