Okay, let's get back to regular posting, shall we? The last month of our vacation was epic. I will give you the details soon, with pictures, but first, let's discuss our heady return to Doha. Our flight home was relatively okay. Not fabulous, but not awful:
I forgot to fill the rental car up with fuel on the way to the airport, which meant I was supposed to pay for a full tank at the bargain price of $9.99 per gallon BUT my good friend Mahmoud at the rental car return place took one look at me and my six year old who was crying with anxiety when I realized I had forgotten and only charged us for a quarter tank, about the same price as a full tank would have been. Crisis #1 averted.
I discovered at the airport that I only left one important item out when I was packing: the charger for the older iPad we use when the husband isn't traveling with us...D'oh! Fortunately, the nice tech store in Salt Lake was happy to take my money to buy a replacement so crisis averted. Our subsequent four hour delay in Salt Lake City meant there was a lot of playing of iPads before we ever left the ground, so hooray for chargers! Crisis #2 averted.
Our delay was the result of storms and a ground stop in Chicago (I HATE O'hare!) so when we finally did take off, our three hour flight turned into a 4 plus hour flight as we circled the airport again and again waiting to be able to land. I had been able to get our scattered seats put all in the same row, so everyone was happy just to play more on the iPads while I kept watching Chicago come close...and then drift far away, over and over again. Eventually, we were able to land, with about an hour and a half left of what should have been our 5 hour layover. As we left the plane, my carry-on strap burst (totally my fault: I had two carry-ons, a big backpack and a fabric tote bag but I kept moving things from the backpack into the tote over the flight and never redistributed and the poor tote just wasn't built to withstand that kind of weight) but I had no time to deal with that since we needed to exit out of the airport, go to Qatar Airways to get our new international boarding passes, pass through security for a second time, and then make it to our gate before the plane boarded. All went smoothly, thank goodness, even carrying my tote in my arms, and we made it to the gate in time to discover our next flight was also delayed, which left us time to get dinner and sew the straps back onto my bag (I'm like MacGyver!). Potential crises 3-5 avoided.
I had all sorts of plans for how I was going to handle the overnight flight with the boys to help them minimize jet lag when we landed, none of which worked out at all. E fell asleep after dinner but was not allowed to sleep on the floor (though people all over were doing it, darn it) so he crashed for 7 hours on my lap and the middle seat. J played video games until all the batteries were gone, refused to watch any TV and wanted to play card games with me, so I shifted E and played games until E finally woke up, refreshed and well rested. More food arrived, though since it was the middle of the night I have no idea why, and somewhere in there, I'm really not sure when, I put my head down on the tray table and passed out. I woke up at least an hour later to find J asleep leaning on my left side and E asleep leaning on my right, both sleeping at exactly the wrong time for my grand plans and for exactly the wrong amounts of time, but I was too exhausted to care by then and just closed my eyes and went back to sleep myself. Another hour or two later, we were all up for the rest of the trip, E happily watching the same two episodes of Ben 10 over and over again and J running through every single activity I had packed in his and his brother's bag in record time. It was a bit of a challenge for him to make it to the end!
Luckily, our bags were first out of the plane, for some miraculous reason, and we were able to get ourselves and our two defective luggage carts out into the waiting area where the husband was meeting us. By the time we made it back to our car, I was sweating from both exertion and exhaustion and the cruelly punishing heat and humidity and I crashed mentally long before the boys were ready to go to bed at 10pm. There were a few rough nights of late night waking and mornings that were either far too early or far too late and now, almost 2 weeks later, the boys are only just adjusted to the schedule here, but I thought that might happen and had built in enough time for them to get close to where they needed to be in time for school.
Sigh. A post soon will cover all the lessons we learned on our trips and during our vacations so we can try not to make the same mistakes again next year, but, as usual, even our best planning won't ever result in the perfect time, so let's celebrate our abilities in crisis management, shall we? A for effort this trip, I say!
I forgot to fill the rental car up with fuel on the way to the airport, which meant I was supposed to pay for a full tank at the bargain price of $9.99 per gallon BUT my good friend Mahmoud at the rental car return place took one look at me and my six year old who was crying with anxiety when I realized I had forgotten and only charged us for a quarter tank, about the same price as a full tank would have been. Crisis #1 averted.
I discovered at the airport that I only left one important item out when I was packing: the charger for the older iPad we use when the husband isn't traveling with us...D'oh! Fortunately, the nice tech store in Salt Lake was happy to take my money to buy a replacement so crisis averted. Our subsequent four hour delay in Salt Lake City meant there was a lot of playing of iPads before we ever left the ground, so hooray for chargers! Crisis #2 averted.
Our delay was the result of storms and a ground stop in Chicago (I HATE O'hare!) so when we finally did take off, our three hour flight turned into a 4 plus hour flight as we circled the airport again and again waiting to be able to land. I had been able to get our scattered seats put all in the same row, so everyone was happy just to play more on the iPads while I kept watching Chicago come close...and then drift far away, over and over again. Eventually, we were able to land, with about an hour and a half left of what should have been our 5 hour layover. As we left the plane, my carry-on strap burst (totally my fault: I had two carry-ons, a big backpack and a fabric tote bag but I kept moving things from the backpack into the tote over the flight and never redistributed and the poor tote just wasn't built to withstand that kind of weight) but I had no time to deal with that since we needed to exit out of the airport, go to Qatar Airways to get our new international boarding passes, pass through security for a second time, and then make it to our gate before the plane boarded. All went smoothly, thank goodness, even carrying my tote in my arms, and we made it to the gate in time to discover our next flight was also delayed, which left us time to get dinner and sew the straps back onto my bag (I'm like MacGyver!). Potential crises 3-5 avoided.
I had all sorts of plans for how I was going to handle the overnight flight with the boys to help them minimize jet lag when we landed, none of which worked out at all. E fell asleep after dinner but was not allowed to sleep on the floor (though people all over were doing it, darn it) so he crashed for 7 hours on my lap and the middle seat. J played video games until all the batteries were gone, refused to watch any TV and wanted to play card games with me, so I shifted E and played games until E finally woke up, refreshed and well rested. More food arrived, though since it was the middle of the night I have no idea why, and somewhere in there, I'm really not sure when, I put my head down on the tray table and passed out. I woke up at least an hour later to find J asleep leaning on my left side and E asleep leaning on my right, both sleeping at exactly the wrong time for my grand plans and for exactly the wrong amounts of time, but I was too exhausted to care by then and just closed my eyes and went back to sleep myself. Another hour or two later, we were all up for the rest of the trip, E happily watching the same two episodes of Ben 10 over and over again and J running through every single activity I had packed in his and his brother's bag in record time. It was a bit of a challenge for him to make it to the end!
Luckily, our bags were first out of the plane, for some miraculous reason, and we were able to get ourselves and our two defective luggage carts out into the waiting area where the husband was meeting us. By the time we made it back to our car, I was sweating from both exertion and exhaustion and the cruelly punishing heat and humidity and I crashed mentally long before the boys were ready to go to bed at 10pm. There were a few rough nights of late night waking and mornings that were either far too early or far too late and now, almost 2 weeks later, the boys are only just adjusted to the schedule here, but I thought that might happen and had built in enough time for them to get close to where they needed to be in time for school.
Sigh. A post soon will cover all the lessons we learned on our trips and during our vacations so we can try not to make the same mistakes again next year, but, as usual, even our best planning won't ever result in the perfect time, so let's celebrate our abilities in crisis management, shall we? A for effort this trip, I say!
I live 15 minutes from O'Hare. Blast!
ReplyDeleteWhat? well, that is good news for the future, because I am SURE we will grounded there again!
Delete