Readjusting

The kids and I are back in the US.  We had a tough trip over.  When I tell people how our travels went they usually asked me if anyone had a meltdown.  Yep.  Me.  Everything went smoothly until we landed in JFK. We’d already been traveling almost 24 hours by this point in the trip.  KLM flight from Arusha to Amsterdam was easy.  Kids slept a lot and it was a new KLM plane (USB chargers on every seat back, power plugs underneath seat…nice touches).  Delta flight from Amsterdam to JFK was bearable.  We had friends on this flight that sat right in front of us, so that kept the kids entertained: girl in Anderson’s class and an 18 month old to keep the girls happy which was good because of the 4 seats that we had two had screens that were frozen (i.e. no movies) and my remote barely worked.  Happily landed in JFK almost an hour early.  This made me happy because I felt that an hour and a half layover was a little tight.  Turns out two and a half hours in JFK is also too tight.  Long customs lines, go to another terminal, go through another long security checkpoint, go to area to wait for bus to take us to gate (over half an hour), sprint through airport to find gate closed for our flight to Rochester.  (I even had asked while waiting for bus and on bus if we could call gate to let them know we were on our way…nope).  My eyes start to tear.  I’m exhausted and we just missed our last 45 minute flight to our destination.  So close, yet so far.  Our scheduled flight was 2:30 in the afternoon.  The flight they get us on is at 10:10 pm, but from LaGuardia.  At least that gives us something to do for 8 hours.  Finally got the kids their bagel that they’d been asking for.  We made it to Rochester at 11:30 pm after almost 40 hours of travel to find our bags safely locked inside the Delta baggage office.  Too tired to care.  We’ll get them in the morning.  And to top it all off when I finally do get the bags the next day I discover that my two external hard drives were stolen.  Ugh!  My whole collection of movies and tv shows.  Delta is reimbursing me for the cost of the drives, but, unfortunately, that’s not where the value was.  Lesson learned. 

Now that we’re here we’re having a blast.  Kids are spending all day in the pool with their cousins and we finally got to meet Marshall.  I even got to spend Father’s Day with my dad. 

The kids are adjusting well and have definitely noticed a few differences between Tanzania in the US:

• When we got in the cab in NYC Ashlyn pointed out that the steering wheel was on the wrong side and that he drove on the wrong side of the road
• Anderson spilled his water at lunch the first day here and T scolded him saying “Anderson, that’s drinking water.  You have to be careful”.  The she caught herself and chuckled…”Oh, I forgot.  All water in America is drinking water”
• They are eating 2 lbs of blueberries a day
• And I noticed that I could do computer updates and downloads in minutes instead of hours.  Nice.

Happy to be stateside and we’re all looking forward to the rest of our trip (and seeing Matt when he joins us in Colorado on Jul 2).