Thursday, 24 June 2010 18:16
We landed in America on Sunday night—well, 80% of our family did anyway; Tim is still in Russia closing up last-minute things there. If any of you women are ever considering moving around the world with 3 children, 9 50-lb suitcases, plus 4 enormous plastic bins of belongings, and no husband to help, let me encourage you to try it soon. It’s so much more than a journey: it’s an Extreme Sport.
At 2 a.m. on Sunday morning, friends in Krasnodar drove us to the airport, where two very efficient gentlemen dealt with our small mountain of luggage, tallied up our steep extra-baggage fees, and gave us a 50% discount “because that’s just ridiculous,” as one of the men told us. “You can’t pay that much.” This flexible attitude toward rules is the kind of thing that used to drive me crazy in Russia; now I love it. Needless to say, we weren’t offered any such deal when we hit New York.
The 3 kids and I flew through Vienna, into New York’s JFK Airport, where we had to change airlines, which meant claiming and re-checking our baggage. Between us, we muscled our suitcases off the conveyer belt and onto 4 luggage carts, which we hauled 1/10 of a mile in the blazing sun, through NY City taxi traffic—tipping them over only 3 or 4 times--to get to the proper terminal. There, about a thousand of us travel-weary passengers milled around a small, humid room like cattle being herded to auction while a team of Very Important But Essentially Useless airline employees did a lot of shouting and waving their arms about at us. It was all very disheartening, especially after 30 hours of no sleep. But we got through it, and found our gate, and although our youngest literally sleepwalked onto the plane for the final leg of the journey, we arrived with everything, including our sense of humor intact.
Now, we’re in New York with my parents. We’ll be in Maine at the end of July. It’s great to catch up with family; wonderfully refreshing to be in the Adirondacks again. Tim will join us next week. Thanks for your prayers as we navigated the globe this time. God is very faithful.
