Hindsight is 20 20

So yesterday we took off for Christmas vacation. Our flight left out of Austin at 7:30am in the morning. Austin is a really small airport and typically there is no line to check in or at security. We didn't think Thursday would be a busy travel day because you could still buy cheap fares as of 2 days ago so we thought the typical hour we allow would be plenty. Wow were we wrong. John dropped me and the kids off to go park the car and we got in line. We got in the southwest line and it took over 45 minutes in line just to check in! I have seen longer lines before and not have them take that long. I couldn't believe the line just wasn't moving. Finally John caught up with us and it was clear we wouldn't make our flight and I just started crying. What was really frustrating was that we had gotten in the line for people who needed assistance instead of the kiosk line because Netta is a lap child and they always tell us to get in that line in order to get her taken care of. Well about the time I started crying I realized the kiosk line was moving quite a bit faster. Maybe if I had gotten in that line we would have made it, but who really knows. Then I got really frustrated when I realized that the reason our line was moving so slowly is because it was filled with people who had missed earlier flights and were trying to rebook. Why hadn't someone been directing the lines and making sure people like us didn't miss our flight because of people like them? They weren't going anywhere anytime soon so we easily could have gone ahead of them and not missed our flight. By not monitoring the lines Southwest actually made their job harder because people missed flights who shouldn't have. 15 people missed our flight all of which were just stuck in the lines. One girl we talked missed the flight even though she got there 1 and 1/2 hours early because it took over an hour to check in at curbside check in, which she assumed was the fastest way. When she asked an employee for help he just said "That sucks" and even when she offered to pay people $40 to get in front of them in line they wouldn't budge. Wow. Tis the season to be jolly. Then southwest's system kept crashing while we were trying to rebook our flight and it took another hour and half just to get new tickets. The people helping us were really friendly, but still it shouldn't have taken that long. We weren't confirmed on a flight till 3:40pm, but we were standby on 10:30am flight. That flight was over sold but seriously by a miracle we made the earlier flight and despite a 2 hour delay in Austin and being stuck on the runway once we landed in Phoenix for about 20 minutes, we were able to make our connection and arrived safely in Salt Lake. When we got here 3 of our bags were already here, but one was still missing. Luckily that one arrived about 20 minutes later, so about 13 hours after starting our day we were finally done. I went back and forth most of the day between hating myself and hating southwest for what happened, but I have realized that we did the best we could with the knowledge we had and hindsight is always 20 20. We are lucky to have made it without further delays and I am just happy to be on vacation with my family.