A bit of a short post today, and one talking about some of our family travel. So if you’re not interested in me or my life, you might as well go ahead and skip this one 🙂
I realized the other day that I almost never pick up someone from the airport. There have been a few times, but mostly it seems that it’s someone picking ME up from the airport. And even on the times that I am doing an airport pickup, I monitor FlightAware to check on when the plane is about to land before heading to the airport, hopefully for the perfect curbside pickup. I can’t remember the last time that I parked and went into the airport to pick someone up.
(SEE ALSO: The #1 trick to tell if your flight is going to be delayed)
Remember too that my local airport is actually in a different state 😀
Picking up my son from the airport
As I’ve mentioned a few times on this site, my son has been on a 2 year church mission in Portland Oregon. I flew with him out there back in September 2020 as my first flights post-pandemic. And the time has flown by and… it was time for him to come back home.
I was monitoring his flights the night before and noticed that one of his flights (United from Chicago O’Hare to Cincinnati) was canceled. United ended up rebooking him automatically to go through Denver, though it meant that he would be home about 2 hours later. We looked at a couple of other options but ended up just keeping that. On the day of travel, I was monitoring his flights and everything went well.
The airport pickup
You can probably imagine that our entire family was pretty excited to see him, so we all got in the van to drive down to the airport. FlightAware was showing his flight as delayed by anywhere from 20-40 minutes (the arrival time kept changing) until we were almost to the airport when we got a notification that said his flight had already landed! We parked in the short-term parking and made our way to the waiting area.
I was nervous that somehow he had gotten there early and we had somehow missed him, but nope. We had to wait about 10-15 minutes as we waited until finally we spotted him!
Definitely a joyous reunion!
And I only had to pay $3 for an hour of parking 🙂
Thanks for reading our story and happy travels!
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Dan Miller travels with his wife and 6 (SIX!) children. He loves to help families travel for free / cheap, especially larger families. If you are looking for help, drop him an email at 
Airport reunions are so special. How exciting for you all!
Thanks! It was definitely a lot of fun and great to see him!
The best new feature of many airports is the cellphone parking lot. You drive to the airport and park in the lot for free, and the person you are meeting calls or texts when a couple of minutes from the terminal door. From the lot at my local airport to the curb takes five minutes to drive and it works perfectly.
Hello! Dan Miller, I’m so happy for you and to your family. Picking up your loved one in the airport is so much fun and excited for everyone.
We’re celebrating with you.
I dropped my son off at the airport this morning. I remarked it has been 40 years since I even parked at LAX. We went to Ontario and it’s only been 15 years since I parked there.
Back in the old days one went to a real gate and we could see the airplanes take off. Not much point in parking and going inside when passengers go through security. No more sitting together until the call for boarding.
Welcome home Scott!