ALLENTOWN, Pa. – Very few people get the chance to travel to the North Pole, but Saturday morning, a special flight took off from Lehigh Valley International Airport to that very destination. On that plane were 15 families who were on Santa’s extra nice list this year.<\/p>\n
Amanda Devaney and her son, Samuel were on the flight. “Even from the beginning, getting a boarding pass for the North Pole with my son’s name on it, and then calling his name, and walking him down the red carpet,” she said.<\/p>\n
Samuel is battling cancer. “Doing something that we can travel and go on a plane without fearing he’s going to get sick,” said Devaney. “This the first time we’ve done something like this, and it’s crazy, this is amazing!”<\/p>\n
Every year a children’s organization is chosen for the magical flight. This year, the Pediatric Cancer Foundation of the Lehigh Valley received the honor.<\/p>\n
Executive Director, Michelle Zenie-Rounds said, “Even though a lot of these kids are still in treatment, still in chemotherapy, receiving radiation, going for treatment or even if they’re in remission, still dealing with the long-term side effects. This takes their minds off it.”<\/p>\n
“It’s almost a feeling of normalcy, even though this is magical in a weird way because for so long, you’re stuck in hospital like,” said Zenie-Rounds.<\/p>\n
Once they landed in the North Pole, they got some time with Santa.<\/p>\n
Zenie-Rounds said, “It’s just an extra little bit of joy in their lives right now.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"ALLENTOWN, Pa. – Very few people get the chance to travel to the North Pole, but Saturday morning,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":60394,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[214,119,121,120,232],"class_list":{"0":"post-60393","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-allentown","8":"tag-_homepage_top_stories","9":"tag-allentown","10":"tag-allentown-headlines","11":"tag-allentown-news","12":"tag-allentown-area"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60393","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=60393"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60393\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/60394"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=60393"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=60393"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=60393"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}