Maddox and Carson were great on the plane ride from Cleveland to St. Louis, lets hope they are this good on the long flight to Germany. Carson sat with me while Maddox, Mom, and Dad sat behind us.
We arrive at the hotel with the double stroller and the luggage. When it’s time to head up the elevator we can’t all fit so we plan to meet on the 4th floor and head to our room. Me, mom, and the 2 boys get on first while Dad waits for the next one with the luggage. There is a housekeeper on the elevator already, we hit the 4 button and start heading up. We are laughing and chatting about how we don’t have any room and get off on the next stop. It was the 2nd floor. Oops. Mom hit the up button and when the elevator comes down she gets on. I yell to her because the elevator is going down, not up, and she starts to get off, but the door starts to close. I tell her to go down and ride back up with Dad, I’ll meet them up there with the boys. After a long game of musical elevators we finally make it to our rooms and Ben meets us later that night.
It’s 5:50am and my alarm rings. It’s time to get up, get dressed, feed the boys and get out the door. Mom and I hop on the shuttle to the airport while Dad and Ben put the luggage in the truck and meet us there. We were quite a sight going through the airport with 9 bags, 3 carry-ons, a diaper bag, 2 carseats, and a double stroller. Can you imagine what it would be like if we had 2 dog crates as well? While waiting in line to check in and check our baggage we realize that American Airlines is by far the slowest airline with the oldest people ever to work the ticket counter. They have 1 person working the first class line, 1 person working with self check in, and 1 person for regular check in. We got to the airport a little after 7am and did not get out of that line until after 8. After everything it was time for our sad goodbyes to my parents. Of course my mom cried, which made me cry and smear all my makeup. After I pulled it together we headed to security. They better not be as slow as the ticket counter people. Thankfully, they weren’t the slow ones, we were. We filled the conveyer belt with things to be scanned again. Ben was a little stressed out, but I reassured him that the first time going through with all this stuff is the hardest. The next time he will know what to expect and it will be much easier…even though it will still take forever.
We board the plane for Dallas, Ben and Maddox are sitting on one side of the aisle and I am on the other. Carson has his own seat next to the window, I am in the middle, and there is an empty seat next to me. Almost everyone was on the plane and I was getting excited that the seat would stay open, but then I see this large black woman heading down the aisle. She stops, looks at me, and sits down. Oh great, I have a carseat and infant on one side and a double wide woman on the other. This was going to be a long flight. She asked the flight attendant for a seat belt extension and we started talking. The plane was about to taxi out and she still didn’t have her extension, so she asked again. The flight attendant apologized and went to get it. When she came back she looks at me with sympathy, Carson crying in my arms, and asked the lady if she would like to move to the first row so she would have more leg room. There was an empty seat! She said yes and, even though she was a nice lady, I was so happy she moved. The rest of the flight was uneventful and the boys had no problems.
We had a two hour layover in Dallas. This was, by far, the biggest airport I had ever been in. It had 4 huge terminals that were connected over a freeway by a skyline. The plane had the longest onramp ever made. It seemed like we walked a mile before we actually made it to the plane. Once we boarded we were supposed to take off at 10:25. The plane was ginormous, with 2 seats on each side and 5 in the middle. There were TV screens on the back of each seat, pull out remote controls that doubled as a game controller, and a giant screen at the front of the cabin that showed the planes position on the trip. At 11:00 we still had not taken off. The pilot notified us that there were 9 dogs in the holding compartment, which was too many, and they had to move them around to different areas (once again we are thankful that we didn’t have the dogs). After an hour of waiting we finally took off. The boys were great for the most part. Carson slept a lot, Maddox played video games with me and watched Shrek.
The airline food was awful except for the tortellini that Ben had for dinner. We didn’t get much sleep during the flight but we survived. After 11.5 hours we landed, waited forever for the stroller, and headed to baggage claim. After getting our baggage off the carousel we maneuvered over to the military area. Ben pushed 2 full carts of stuff, I pushed the stroller, and pulled a train of blue bags behind me. The new light weight luggage my parents got us for Christmas definitely came in handy.
The reception guys who are at the airport put us in a line and told us to follow the leader as they take us to the waiting area. We get to an escalator and I stop. I tell them there is no way I am taking this double stroller up the escalator. The people looked a little confused and asked an old man who works at the airport to take me to an elevator. The old man tells me that he is not going up with me, but when I get off to make a u-turn and walk back the way I came. I get up to the second floor, start walking sweating bullets, and I don’t see anybody. They didn’t wait for me…what do I do now? I didn’t even have my purse or any of our passports. After walking around a bit I see a private in uniform. I begged him to help me find where I am supposed to be and he took us up another elevator and down a long hallway that I never would have found on my own. I found Ben and told him to never leave me alone in a foreign country’s airport again. They had toys for the kids to play with and Maddox made a new girlfriend.
We waited in the waiting area for a couple of hours before getting on the shuttle and heading to Heidelberg. We ended up getting here around 1pm, checked in to the hotel, and struggled to stay awake the rest of the day.
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