When you can fly standby, you sometimes make impulsive decisions. 

I saw that Parker Valby was doing a holiday mile race near Tampa in December and thought one of my children would want to go run in it. She did and she loves Parker, so we made a plan to go. However, I didn’t quite realize we would be traveling the weekend before Christmas until we were dealing with a ton of travelers on our trip. 

We left on a Friday morning and the race was that evening. We had to make a connection in Charlotte, N.C. (Not my favorite airport at all.) We got on both flights just fine and I let my daughter have a business class seat on the flight to Charlotte. Tampa has a nice airport and after we got our rental car, we headed to the hotel. She got changed and ready for the race and then we made a stop at the Chick-Fil-A that has an enormous holiday light display. It was still daylight, but we could tell it would be quite a show. Then, we headed off to the race location.

There was a meet-and-greet first and so we ended up being in line for a while. Then, the race was delayed for an hour so the line could work its way through until the end. My daughter loved being able to meet Parker and she did really well in the race. We found a really nice restaurant for dinner – Tarpon Turtle.

Our flight didn’t leave until the afternoon on Saturday, so we checked out of the hotel and bought some snacks at a Walmart and headed to Sunset Beach for lunch. It was a bit windy and we had a few birds try to steal our food, but it was calm and peaceful and beautiful. We then went shopping at Tarpon Springs Sponge Docks. 

We killed some time at the airport and while we got on our flight to Charlotte, it didn’t look like we’d get on a flight back to our original airport. We changed flights to an airport 1.5 hours away instead so we’d get home that night. A little stressful, but we made it work. That’s why you only take carry-ons when you fly standby and why I’ll recommend not flying standby the weekend before Christmas.