How do the geese do it?

Seven kids and five adults start out at 5:30 am to travel 1500 miles on two flights through three airports. How long will it take?

We arrived in Boulder about 4 pm local time. It was about 90 degrees when we left the airport in Denver. On both flights our group had seats scattered through the plane, so we had pairs of kids sitting without adults. (On the second flight Anna and Autumn had window seats on opposite ends of the same row, but they negotiated with the other people in the row so that they could sit together. I was going to try to work it out for them but they handled it by themselves,)

Making our way through airports was challenging. There always seemed to be one or two kids who were so excited that they would get out well ahead of the group and end up taking the wrong turn, so we would have to retrieve them before we could head on in the proper direction. An "attractive V formation" would have been such an improvement.

Like most traveling it was hurry up and wait. Even when we got to Boulder we had another hour wait while Shannon went through the registration process. This time, though, there were other OM teams around and the bit of shade that our team had staked out turned out to be a prime piece of real estate for trading the souvenir pins that are a signature of OM events. The kids met other teams from Oregon, Singapore, Vermont, North Carolina, and Oklahoma, and traded pins with them.

Anna and Autumn just came back from a trip into the mountains and downtown to Pearl Street. Autumn says: "The were doing a trick on Pearl St. And Christian was part of the trick. He got to go up and help the guy who was performing. He threw stuff to him. The guy was on a soooo tall unicycle. We had to go 'One, two, three, JUGGLE!' Christian got all scared because he thought he had to catch the guy's flaming torches. But the guy blew them out and Christian caught them then."

Anna: "The mountains were just out of Boulder. They were so high we could hardly breathe. We went to a peak where we could climb on the rocks and it was fun and we watched the sunset. We saw five bikers. On the way down a biker passed us."