So our flights.  They went well.  Thank you for praying.

Some highlights:

Play: Our good friends Jonathan and Kerin, who used to live in Austin but currently live in Columbia, came up to Charlotte and hung out with us during our four-hour layover.  It was so fun.  Our kids got to run ragged with them, and we actually got out of the airport and hit up a local Starbucks.  Kerin brought crafts for the kids to do while the grown-ups chatted, caught up, and talked shop about living internationally.  It was truly the highlight of our flight back.  Thanks again, friends.  We were blessed and refreshed.

Sleep: Shockingly, both kids slept a few hours.  On our 10-hour leg, they both slept about the last two hours.  The good part of that is that, well, they slept.  The not-so-great part is that both kids fell asleep with their heads on my right leg – Garbanzo with his legs across me and onto his daddy’s lap, and Chickpea going the other direction, with her feet smooshed up to the nicest stranger I’ve ever met on a plane.  They fell asleep when I wasn’t in the entirely most comfortable position, so my back and legs were killing me by the end of the flight.  I also had to have my hand just-so, so that Garbanzo didn’t roll right off onto the floor.  Entertainment, indeed.

Mr. Nice Stranger: Chickpea was sandwiched between me and the nicest stranger ever.  I think he was probably a grandfather, because he took one look at the four of us sharing his row in the middle aisle, and said, “Hey!  Great!  Traveling with kids is wonderful,” and then proceeded to help us out when the meals came, blow it off when Chick kicked him repeatedly in her sleep (see above), and generally smiling at us as if to reassure us that we weren’t annoying him at all.  So he was either St. Nick in disguise, or he was smoking something.  Either way, it worked in our favor.

Luggage: All bajillion of our bags and boxes arrived – not without serious hassle, though.  There was a sweet-but-rather-naive woman at the Austin airport who checked us in, and told us she was not allowed to check our bags all the way to our final destination, because we were flying over two days.  We tried to explain to her the magic of time zones, that most international flights span more than one day when you move ahead with the time change.  But she adamantly said that her computer would not allow her to check our bags all the way, and so we’d need to claim them and recheck them in Munich.

There were several hassles with this.  The obvious one is that the amount of our bags covered five luggage carts, and there were two adults.  So we had to load all the bags ourselves (we had my parents with us in Austin, both to help with the manual labor and to entertain the kids), and then inch our way to customs.  You have to keep your bags in sight the whole time, so Kabob would go about 20 feet with two carts while I stayed with the other three and the kiddos, and then run back to get two more carts.  I would push the final cart along with Chickpea in her brother’s stroller, and with Garbanzo on my back (thank you, again, New Parents class, for that Ergo).  And over and over it would go, until we finally rechecked our bags.

The other issue with this is that we had to enter Germany in order to get our bags – thus waiting to get our passports stamped – and then we had to leave Germany after rechecking our bags in order to get our last flight.

And of course, there was the fun of waiting in line to check our bags again – and unlike Austin, this line was verrrry long.  So I waited off to the side with four of the luggage carts and the kids, who were mildly stir-crazy by now, and Kabob slithered his way through the line with one of the carts.  When he made it to the front,  the three of us bumbled our way up to the front from the side, hoping that our pathetic looks would garner up some sympathy from the nice Lufthansa people.  It mostly worked.

But our biggest concern was that we’d have to pay for extra luggage twice.  This amount of extra luggage going internationally is not cheap.  We’d already paid a pretty penny, so we were praying they woudn’t hit us twice.  Thankfully, a wonderful Lufthansa woman in Charlotte couldn’t believe the woman in Austin’s lack of knowledge about handling international flights, and printed us a receipt that assured the people in Munich we’d already paid them for extra luggage.  Because of this, we didn’t have to pay double.  Thank you, Lord.

So after all this, all our bags arrived, and we are now home, having unpacked about half of them.  We anticipate this taking awhile, but since we’re here, we’re in no hurry.  Well, I’m in a hurry because I want to snuggle in to our home, and four months of living out of a suitcase bit me hard with the nesting instinct.  But for once, we’re not in anybody’s way.

Out of half, this was all that’s been damaged out of our bags so far:


It could be worse. The red “puddle” was peeled off from the inside of the plastic box it was shipped in, and the paper was the instructions for the nail kit.  And this was a freebie from blogger’s swag for Simple Mom.

Please pray for jet lag recovery, as the kids always have a harder time with this than the grown-ups. Last night, Chickpea climbed in to bed with us and talked pretty much all night, about who-knows-what.

Oh, and this last photo during our layover in Munich is for MeMee. Get it?  Let us know if you don’t.

posted: 09 March 2
under: family, travel