Travel Redux

OK Here is the first installment of the travel tale.

The scene opens with a view of a darkened hotel room. Cue the ringing of a phone....
Our first wake up call. New Orleans Airport Holiday Inn. 5AM.

Cut to a view of the inside of an airplane. the hum of the engines, the murmur of people talking, the rattling of the drink cart going down the aisles. Cameron wants to take pictures of us going to Russia.

(Sad to say, but this is the BEST we will look for the next four days.)

Washington Dulles Airport.   Next scene opens with the noise of airport terminal announcements.  People rushing, jostling. Tension in the air as people rush to their connections.Cameron wants to carry(roll) his carry on, but it keeps tipping over and he gets frustrated and starts whining....

We ahve landed in Washington, it is 9:30 AM, and our connection to Moscow Domdedovo Airport departs at 4:45PM. Our first layover is seven hours...

Hard to keep a six year old entertained and stationary in a place designed for adults to move quickly through.

The flight to Moscow is on United airlines. United is a fine enough American airline company, and the individuals we met that worked with us were uniformly helpful and efficient, but after you have flown Korean airline, you are spoiled forever. We had prepared Cameron and ourselves for the experience Leanna and I enjoyed on our first trip over on Korean Air. Plush seating, gourmet food, amazing service, and exceptional in flight entertainment. The United experience was, well, NOTHING like that. Cameron was let down because he was expecting seat back movies, games and music all designed for individual selection. Each seat with on demand DVD, Nintendo, and 21 music stations to chose from through your individual headphone. What we got instead was one movie selection, ten scratchy music channels, and no inflight games, except for what I could pull up on my phone, which was rapidly losing its charge.

We tried to sleep fitfully, Cameron and I got a couple of hours at a time. Leanna was all nerves and ears, and the three hundred dollar investment in noise canceling headphones turned out to be a waste for her. She says she slept only about an hour on this leg of the trip. We arrived in Moscow about 10:30 the next day, Friday.

This is where the fun starts....

We get off the plane, and know we have an eleven hour layover. We aren't sure if our baggage is checked all the way through to Vlad or if we have to claim our baggage and take it through customs or not. We approach an airline representative. No english, and no translator. We are good at charades, but difficult higher level communication does not serve our talents very well. They shrug and pass us on the passport control. We make ti through passport control. We are the last onmes through because of the delay at the information (Yeah right) booth. We go through the passport check and can't figure out which flight is ours and which one of the five baggage courosels has our bags. Turns out none of them does anymore. We see some worker wheeling our bags toward the unclaimed baggage room. I run over to him and convince him that these are our bags, and we look at the long line to go through customs.

We go over and talk to the information stand , to ask our question again. This sign is printed in english and cyrillic, so we feel confident we can get an answer,..... no luck. This repre sentative has NO ides what we are asking , so she asks us to wait a moment while she talks to her boss. The boss comes over (Oh shit), and motions us to another area, where no one else is standing. At this point we don't know WHAT is going on, but we roll our baggage cart behind him, and he takes us through two locked doors and motions for us to go through. LO AND BEHOLD- He has walked us out of the customs checkpoint entirely! We couild have carried a case of contraband or a nuclear warhead in our bags nad no one would have known!

We walk into Moscow airport. At this point we are a little more than 24 hoiurs into our travel, and looking forward to an 11 hour layover here. We had tried to locate an airport hotel room to shower and rest, but our travel agent couldn't locate one, and the flight attendants had warnded us against trying to locate one on our own. So, at this point, we try to find a comfortable place to spend the next several hours. (all together now, Yeah Right).

Airports are essentially the same the world over, just different degrees of misery and nastiness. This particular airport is an amalgam of 1970's soviet era bus station vibe, with newer, much more modern gates and concourse areas. We don't discover this though, until we have spent several hours in the bus station section of the airport. We were tired , and disoriented and found the first empty seats and planted ourselves for what we expected to be the most unpleasant part of our trip.

We got something to eat, and watched the people parade go by. Napping is a challenge. the seats are cold, pressed aluminum and impossible to lay or even slump over in. Cameron ended up sleeping on coat on the floor beneath us. Leanna and I took turns watching our bags, and our son, while the other takes short forays to discover, phones, bathrooms, retaurants, and much to my delight, vending machines which sell many tyupes of beer. (we tried a couple).

It is noisy, hot, brightly lit, and throughly uncomfortable. Time seems to stand still. We watch the gray leaden sky turn to red, then black. No sun was seen at all today.

Have any of you watched the movie The Terminal? It is a movie starring Tom Hanks and he lives in an airport for a period of time. Watch it. That was us.

Eventually , time grinds around the clockface and we are getting close to two hours until scheduled departure. It is almost 8 oclock and we are to leave at 9:50. We hear an announcement which mentions something about Vladivostock so our ears perk up. I stumble to the departures screen and see something in cyrillic in red behind our flight number, NOT good. They are announcing a delay for departure for our flight. That much we get. We can't find out the reason for the delay, but at this point, theres not much else we can do, so we wait.

We have discovered the newer, nicer section of the airport. Still pressed aluminum seats but at least no armrests so cameron can lay down an sleep some. We sit next to a Russian woman who speaks good English, and she explains that we are delayed because of weather systems moving across. (cue foreboding music- duh duh DUHHH)

lego man

So, we wait. 

and wait some more.

Finally, we are instructed to go down the concourse and to guess what?   wait some more.

We finally have a gate and a departure time time. We notice out the window that there are a few snow flakes drifting down through the shafts of light. Leanna and Cameron get a sandwich at the terminal restuarant.

We are instructed to board our aircraft after eighteen hours in the Moscow airport. The final leg of our journey awaits.......This is 3AM, after twelve hours on airplanes, and twenty three hours of layovers and delays. I can't tell you how many time zones, cruddy minutes of sleep, or second guesses about what we did to deserve this.


Second half to come.

Plane takes off, lights go out after security announcements, then dizzy, spinning, fade to black....