Headed across the country!

For my work they send the supervisors and dispatcher II's back to the EMI (Emergency Management Institute) classes back at the National Fire Academy in Emmitsburg MD. The course we were chosen to attend was Homeland Security. Chris and I were so excited to go! Neither one of us had been that far across the country. I was a little nervous though I'd never been away from my family that long!

Woo hoo! We're off!!

Last time to see our beautiful mountains for 9 days!

We left at 230 our time and landed there at 8pm their time. Here we are CLEAR across the country.. we hop on the shuttle bus to go to the rental car place and the people on the shuttle sitting next to us are from Davis County. She's a teacher in Weber County and her brother works for South Ogden Police dept!

We went to go get our rental car which we had made reservations for online.. and had nothing but attitude and problems and resistance from them. It was unreal. We had made the reservations with Dollar Rental. The lady was so rude to us. We ended up not renting from them and walked over to the place next door. We were trying to get some help at the Thrifty desk when the very rude unhelpful lady walked over and began talking to the lady trying to help us. Turns out they're from the same company! They weren't helpful and told us we wouldn't find anything for less than 80 dollars a day there.

The nicest thing they did for us was call a taxi. That was almost asking too much to ask from them! Our taxi driver showed up in a mini van. As we're hauling our luggage out there he comes out of the van and says there's more people inside he needs to pick up. We get into the van its running and unlocked. The front seat is piled high of bags of chips and food wrappers. He's got his lighter hanging off his visor.. big gulp of mt dew next to him. He comes walking out with a guy and his 2 kids. They pile in with us and the kids talk our ear off as we head to the hotel as the driver acts like its Nascar. Driving in 2 lanes. Not signaling and talking as much as the kids were.

We finally made it to the hotel where the clerk was hiding behind bullet proof glass. Welcome to Baltimore! We put out stuff in the room and decided to walk to Taco Bell which is like 500 ft from the hotel. We're tired. We don't have our rental car. It looks like we're in a scary place at night. We were ready to call it a night!

In Taco Bell we ordered our food and I asked the girl for some ketchup packets. She looked at me and started laughing at me. Told me they don't carry ketchup. Then she turns to the guy and says "she wants KETCHUP!" I was floored that they didn't carry ketchup in that restaurant!!!!

We walked back to our room to start flipping through phone books to find a rental car for the morning. We called Enterprise and they were FANTASTIC! We got a deal on a car for LESS than what we had booked with Dollar. Their fees were less too! I was so excited. Just as we're getting ready to go to sleep.. its 1am there we get a loud knock on our door. There is some black guy standing outside just banging on our door trying to look through the peep hole and yelling for us to open up. He keeps knocking and knocking. Chris grabs the phone and calls the front desk. They said they'd be right up.. but they never showed up. Finally after about 5 min he leaves and we tried to get some sleep!