We just flew in…

And are our arms tired—along with the rest of us. What? I can’t tell a bad joke after 23 hours of travel? I will tell you this, everything in Kazakhstan now appears like a cakewalk compared to the trip home. Not that the trip was bad or turned in to Airport 75 (or 77), it was just long, grueling and fraught with the dangers of less intelligent individuals in positions that directly affect your schedule. We were picked up at our apartment at 2:00 AM to go to the airport (after an evening of very little sleep). We knew it wasn’t going to be our day when we spent thirty minutes at the KLM counter in Almaty, yes thirty minutes at the counter, not just in line. That was just to get our boarding passes to get on the plane (even though we already had paid reservations). Thirty minutes of clicking away on their computer, printing passes, tearing up passes, printing passes again only to be shredded again, calling in supervisors that did not make things go any faster—but at least they looked official—only to find out we were not sitting together on the plane. Nice. Fortunately we blew through customs quickly and was only questioned when our carry on went through x-ray with all these tiny little bottles showing up. I just said “votka” and got an understanding nod and we were on our way. Our flight was at 4:00 AM and spent the next seven hours outracing the sunrise. When we got to Amsterdam we were told at the transfer desk that the flight was overbooked and there were no seats for us (again, we had paid for these tickets in advance). Nice, again. We were told to stand in the excruciatingly long line at the gate to see if anything would come available. Someone who was patrolling the line must have felt our scowls piercing into her back and came over to check our flight documents. She ended up going to the counter and much to our surprise came back with not only two boarding passes but seats that were together. Disaster (well, inconvenience), narrowly averted. The NWA flight was uneventful and Terri and I enjoyed watching some movies, listening to music and I played a few video games. I really like the Airbus 330, it has decent seating space for an airliner so you do not quite have that feeling of being an airborne sardine.

We arrived in Detroit about an hour early. Had this not been the case we would have probably missed our next flight. When you first land in the US from and international origin you need to retrieve your luggage and then recheck it after you go through customs where they ask you if you have brought back meats, produce, seeds, enriched uranium, Kalashnikovs or whatever. Once we cleared customs a screening clerk directed us to line ‘B’. We stood there quite a while as precious minutes ticked away only to watch people in line ‘A’ blow through briskly. I watched in disbelief as these people were moving through while we just watched. We eventually flagged down another employee who had managed to avoid us for some time. We mentioned that while we enjoyed standing in line immensely we were curious if we were actually going to get the opportunity to catch our flight or if we should just plan on going to a hotel or something. The lady curtly looked at our tickets and matter-of-factly informed us we had been assigned to the wrong line and we should be in the “A” line to make sure we made our connection—duh! The original screening clerk must have lied on her resumé about being able to distinguish between different levels of time. I think when you have less than twenty minutes to get to your next flight that it should be a no-brainer that you into the ‘A’ line—but that’s just me. Fortunately, we got to our gate with very little time to spare. The flight home was uneventful (thankfully). The biggest mishap was stepping on Terri’s glasses that fell to the floor while she napped. When we landed in San Antonio, Terri and I agreed that the travel gods must have wanted to screw around with us for their amusement. We did decide that when we brought the boys home we were definitely going to make an overnight stop—not only for our sake but for their sake.

Terri’s parents picked us up from our odyssey and we would soon be at our good ol’ casa. Our dogs saw us and it was like we never left. They were so excited to see us—you gotta love dogs—unconditional love! By this time we were so sick and dehydrated, Terri had a 101ºF fever, chills and sore throat and I had developed a nice cold. We went straight to bed and crashed for hours. Later I got up to go get us dinner. Tonight, nothing other than a Whataburger would do. If you don’t live near a Whataburger I do sincerely feel bad for you. Needless to say, having this little piece of Americana…well…Texana was just what I needed to acclimate back to home. Then it was back to bed for Terri and for some strange reason I was not ready to go sleep so I sat down in my comfortable chair just in time to see the Spurs play. Ah, it is good to be home.

A quick note: Sorry for the delay in getting this posted. Terri and I have been sick and jet lagged and having an overall feeling of blah as well as missing our boys greatly. Tune in later this week as Terri and I will have birthday wishes for each our boys and show the progress we will (hopefully) make on getting their room together. Sadly, we will miss their birthdays but we will definitely make sure they get a nice party when we them home.