How do you get from Glacier National Park in Montana to Charlotte in North Carolina? It's easy really: just catch an overnight train to Seattle (heading east: the wrong way), then a quick hop to Charlotte Airport via Atlanta, then a brief two-hour drive. As it turned out the journey was even longer ...
We caught the overnight Amtrak train from Whitefish (near Glacier National Park), having fittedi n watching the 6th Harry Potter film first (we didn't think it was that good - but then neither was the book). Had a lovely breakfast on the train in the morning, after the girls slept perfectly (the adults, less so). 
In Seattle, we caught a bus to the airport, then uneventfully caught the afternoon plane to Charlotte with 37 minutes to change at Atlanta late at night to catch the last plane to Charlotte, where we'd booked to stay the night. The lady on the check-out desk told us that the Atlanta plane was delayed 20 minutes, so we decided to accept Delta Airlines' kind offer of a free hotel for the night at Atlanta, from where we'd catch a plane the next morning to Charlotte. The lady also assured us that someone would be waiting to show us where to go. I didn't believe this, so the lady went to get her supervisor's name and wrote it down for me, and assured me that Delta would provide a hotel for free and would meet us. Can you guess the end to this story?
We landed at about 11 pm in Atlanta to absolute chaos: hundreds of passengers who had missed connections being fobbed off with worthless hotel vouchers, and not a Delta Airlines representative in sight. We decided to stay the night in Atlanta Airport (we hadn't got a lot of choice), and after eating we queued up at 2.30 to try to persuade the airline staff to check us in (no dice). We eventually managed to check in at 4 am, and after clearing security looked up our gate number.
Atlanta airport is huge (it's one of the main US hubs), and is divided into different terminals called "concourses", each of which has a different letter. Our tickets said that we would leave from gate B16; the departures board said that we would leave from T1; when we walked about a quarter of a mile along endless corridors to this concourse, the departure board there said we'd leave from a gate in F terminal (can't remember the number). In despair at 4.45 am we lay down to sleep for a couple of hours on the seats: the first sleep that Joanna and Pippa had had all night. What more can will our children have to cope with?
We got up refreshed (!) at 6.45, and checked in to the flight to Charlotte, which actually took off and landed only about half an hour late. Rented a car and drove to Winston-Salem!
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