Finally Home

First things first – we are home! Our final flight landed just after 9PM last night and we finally got home just after 10:00. (That was equivalent to 5AM today “body time.”) We know our luggage made it to Chicago, but did not make it on our flight home. I’m not at all concerned… I haven’t seen it since Tuesday, anyway. Why start now? Rebecca and Dan both slept all the way to Orlando from Chicago and probably would have stayed that way had our landing not woken them up. She was excited to finally see “Rebecca’s big bed” and once tucked in went right to sleep. Dan and I, after being tackled a few times by Carey, our son’s dog, were able to go in and say hello to Timothy. He was already in bed, but trying to stay awake holding out for us. After his big smiles and good night kisses, we headed to our room. Before turning in for the night, we both showered (HELLO big shower with consistent hot water!) and brushed our teeth with our Sonicare toothbrush. (I know those probably sound like trivial details, but you’ll appreciate them more after hearing the story of our flights.)

I will not go into all the details of our flights home, but did journal our trip for myself in a notebook (just starting at the airport Tuesday morning through taking off from Chicago last night I was on page 15.) Trust me, you don’t want to relive this part of the journey with us. Okay, here we go…

 Tuesday - The longest day ever… our longest day began with Victor and the taxi driver arriving at our apartment at 4AM Tuesday. (That was 9PM EST Monday night if you want to keep track of how long it took us to get home.) It was snowing pretty heartily in Kiev, but didn’t sound like the airport would be affected. We arrived at the airport at 5AM for our 7AM flight and found an already huge crowd of people. Kiev is different from every other airport in the world. You cannot check in (like you would at the first counter in other airports) until the departure board lists a check in gate for your flight. That means that EVERYONE in the airport was waiting in an area the size of one of Orlando’s baggage claim areas. Same size, NOT same amenities. There are NO chairs. Around 8AM, we were told our flight would be delayed until 2:10PM and our check in time would be noon. Okay, that’s not so bad. We only have four hours to wait until check in time. It didn’t really seem to make sense to try to leave the airport and come back, so we went upstairs to the only restaurant to find breakfast. Good in theory, bad in practice. One restaurant, thousands of people waiting and the restaurant is the ONLY place in the airport you can smoke. A nice man from Russia who also spoke a bit of English and a bit of Spanish offered to share his table with us. Knowing there was nowhere else to sit in the airport, we stretched that meal out for hours ordering one thing at a time and eventually leaving around noon. (There were many people who’d been there longer than us who were still sitting (or sleeping) at their tables when we left. The airport did truly open at 2:00 and for the rest of the day, we watched our scheduled departure time be pushed back in two hour increments. The last posted time we saw for it was 8:20 PM and at 6:15PM we got the long-awaited “check in at counter 7” message. What’d we do for the 6+ hours in between? Sorry, this is the short version… mostly sat on the floor in a hallway or on a cold marble staircase. Dan waited in a line, I mean an unruly mob, at the ticket counter a few times for 90 minutes at a time, but was never able to make any progress. I’m going to spare you the dysfunctional check-in process sections. (I’ll tell you later if you really want to know.) We finally boarded the plane around 9:30. BTW, no jetway for that. You go down a flight of stairs and take a standing room only bus to the plane’s location on the tarmac. The bus almost got stuck in snow a few times on the way there and it was SO icy from the bus to the stairs of the plane with frigid wind gusts that Dan fell twice. (He says he’s okay… ugly bruise on his knee.) We were so excited to sit down on that plane. It was clean, had seats for each of us, friendly staff… my list could go on for pages. The pilot was quite informative and told us about delay after delay and how he would solve each issue. They even fed us a hot meal while we waited it was taking so long! The final problem that would prevent our departure was when a landing aircraft slid off the end of the runway and the airport declared all runways closed till 7AM. So, at 1AM our friendly pilot announced we would have to get off the plane and go back inside the airport. Getting out of the airport was almost worse than getting in. Same icy stairs off plane, same bus back to terminal and an almost riotous mob trying to get out of the airport. (Passport officials had to undo all the departure stamps.)

Wednesday – early morning: Our saving grace that night and into the wee hours of the morning, truly an angel sent by God, was a woman named Natalia. She let us use her phone to call our translator and even before he called back to tell us he wasn’t able to find a hotel room, she had gotten us a choice of two rooms in the hotel 500m from the airport that was telling everyone else it was fully booked. She also spoke Russian as well as English and explained everything to Rebecca for us. So, after a full 24 hours awake, we landed in our beds at the Borispol airport hotel (think 1970’s Holiday Inn for $150 a night) at 3AM. We were told we’d need to be back at the airport at 7AM the next morning and Dan got up and showered and was ready to go there with Natalia (I would stay at the hotel with sleeping Rebecca). He stopped, though, because Natalia called as he was ready to walk out the door and said, “Go back to bed. The airport is closed till 11AM.” Around 9:30AM I was finally able to get a somewhat competent human on the phone at Lufthansa’s Kiev office. (Don’t get us started… Lufthansa as a whole is great. The way they and their staff function in Kiev is… let’s just say not.) She told us we were scheduled for the same flight as the day before. It was a 2:10 flight, but would not take off until 6:00PM. We would then have to spend Wednesday night in Frankfurt and Thursday morning fly to Chicago and subsequently Orlando landing around 5PM. If we had had to spend another day in the airport, we might have… I don’t even have the words to express it. Because the hotel is so close to the airport, it shows the departure board on your in room TV. We were able to sit in our hotel room Wednesday and watch our scheduled departure time change all day, just like it had the day before, until 4:25PM when it changed to announce a check in counter. We grabbed our things (really not much because they kept our checked bags and we were trying to fly light… that means same clothes – day 2) and rushed out the front of the hotel. We hurried back down the icy sidewalk to the airport and got in line to start all over again. Natalia was not there Wednesday night, she’d managed to get on the earlier flight, but God sent us a new friend. Kat (really Kateryna) was born in Ukraine and is now a medical student in Texas. She was also fabulous with Rebecca and I enjoyed chatting with her. You have no idea what it is like to have no one to have a real conversation with for almost a month. I’m an ISTJ, but it was hard for even me! Imagine Dan’s plight… Okay, back to the story, Kat was seated across the aisle from us and this plane did actually finally take off around 8:30PM and we made it safely to Frankfurt. No more flights out of there for the night, but we were given a great ticket agent. He not only offered to put us up in a hotel, but persuaded the German border police to issue Rebecca a temporary visa (we could have left the airport with our US passports, but because hers was Ukrainian she could not), paid the charges related to her visa, and fixed our airline tickets for Thursday. Yes, fixed our tickets. One of the agents in Kiev had invalidated them! UGH! He even called the luggage department and persuaded THEM to keep our bags overnight so we wouldn’t have to check them again. Remember the terrorist attempt on Christmas? The guy started in Germany, so their security was reported to be quite heightened. We took the shuttle to the hotel and were finally in bed around midnight local time… had to be up and on the 4:45 shuttle in the morning. (Yup, same clothes, day 3.)

Thursday - Other than waiting in line for quite a while at the United ticket counter to check in, our Frankfurt check in went pretty smoothly. The heightened security measures weren’t really an issue for us. Our only glitch was we had seats 23A & 23B and one in row 33. Since it was going to be such a long flight (10hours 45minutes), I tried to negotiate a closer seat at the gate, but was told that “row 33 was the closest seat available to row 23.” Interestingly, Kat was in line behind me and had no seat assigned. In an effort to be closet to us, she asked to be “near row 23” and they gave her seat 23C. The aisle seat directly across from our other 2 seats! Another angel sent to us from God. She traded seats with us. There is no way we could have sat together or convinced anyone else to trade an aisle seat in economy plus for a center, smaller seat in economy. (Sorry, I’m supposed to be writing the short version….) We had an uneventful takeoff and flight for about 2 hours when the pilot said we had a mechanical issue and were going to London. Dan and I looked at each other and almost cried. Thankfully, it WAS fixable, and after about 2½ hours on the ground in a plane with minimal power and no AC, we were taking off again. USA here we come! We finally landed in Chicago just after 3PM (their time)… 14 hours on the same plane. Customs, passport control and immigration were uneventful and Rebecca is now a US citizen, but we couldn’t stop to celebrate because we still needed flights home. (Our connection left over 2 hours ago.) They booked us on a 5:30PM flight out of Chicago, we picked up our checked bags and rechecked them, went through security again (the most stringent since leaving home on 12/6), a nice lady kindly traded seats so we could sit together, and we all made it home safely.

Follow up – while I was writing our luggage was delivered. Rebecca was sitting with Dan and Tim watching Superman on TV. Ahh, the world as it should be. There’s still tons to do, but we are all finally home. Thanks for all the love, support and prayers. I WILL get some pictures posted for you, but it just might take a little while.

Happy New Year!
Kathi, Dan, Timothy, Rebecca,and Carey… the happy, happy dog because we finally came home!