Public Service Announcement: Don't travel with Erin and Amiee

Ok, I have quite a few updates to post, but I'd like to write a little about the ridiculous travels that Amiee and I had over the past few days.

Originally, Amiee and I were supposed to leave the US on Friday, fly through Munich, and arrive in Kiev on Saturday. Simple, yes? Not so much.

We got all checked in and were comfortably waiting at our gate in the Huntsville airport, with the monitors telling us that our plane was on time when I went to the bathroom for just a couple minutes. Upon returning, I found that the monitor had been changed and was informing us that our flight had been delayed by an hour and a half. That wouldn't work because our connection time in Chicago was only going to be 45 minutes. This little incident resulted in our being reticketed for Saturday flights instead. Spending an extra day at home was, by no means, a bad situation. Apparently, all flights in and out of O'Hare were on hold because of terrible thunderstorms. Yikes!

On Saturday, our flight was delayed, yet again. This put us in a very similar situation as the previous day. We did make our flight, though. Mom helped us work out the kinks...it was a little hairy. When we arrived in Chicago, though, we literally had to run- "Home Alone" style (did you like that, Bradford?)- to make our flight. We ran up panting and gasping, just in time to board.

The flight itself was ok; we got to watch a great movie (Extraordinary Measures) and got about 4 hours of frequently-interrupted sleep. When we arrived in Frankfurt, however, we weren't allowed to deplane. Why? Because there had been a medical emergency mid-flight, and the paramedics were coming to retrieve the sick person. It took 20 minutes before we even started to deplane. When we landed in Frankfurt, Amiee and I had about an hour and 20 minutes before our next flight (remember that). However, we really needed to hustle because we hadn't been issued our boarding passes for the last leg of the flight and needed to go check in.

We scurried to get on the shuttle buses that transport passengers from the plane to the airport (European airports do that a lot more frequently than American airports). The ride to the airport was SUPPOSED to take about 2 minutes.

It didn't.

About 45 seconds into the ride, we had an accident! Our driver had to slam on the brakes to avoid hitting a luggage truck that tried to zip in front of us, and everyone in there (about 100 people- it was a 2-part bus) went flying. We fell into each other, onto the floor, into windows...I slammed into Amiee, she fell into the guy behind her, dominoes-style. Several people were injured, and the ambulance came so that more paramedics could check on things. We were on the bus for another 20 minutes before they put us on a different bus. They didn't immediately move us, however, because quite a few people had to fill out damaged luggage reports because their rolling carry-ons were damaged during the accident. Amiee and I were starting to sweat because we only had 30 minutes to make our next flight.

When we finally reached the building, we discovered that we only had about 25 minutes to change terminals, go through security, find our gate, get our boarding passes, and get on the plane. We started sprinting. Literally sprinting. Our backpacks were weighing us down, but we made time. Frankfurt has the looooongest hallways and many non-functioning escalators. Thankfully, we hit security during a lull and made it through in record time. Seriously? We had to run to catch 2 out of 3 flights.

When we were checking in to get our boarding passes, the gate agent had to call the plane to have them wait on us. Yikes! In a stroke of good fortune, the plane was overbooked, and we got bumped to business class. Make that "business class"- it wasn't incredibly fancy, but we got a tad more space, slightly better food, and the nice flight attendant.

To end our travels, we had some positive things happen like getting through immigration in 5 minutes, having Amiee's bag arrive in about 15, and getting on an earlier-than-expected bus to Poltava. By the time we got home 5 hours later, we were ex-hausted. It was nice to see Nastia and to get home and not be cramped up in a small space or running everywhere. Also, it was nice to finally be able to hydrate; because of all the running and close calls on the flights, we never had time to buy water- and you know how they serve you the tiniest cups of water on flights.

Whew. Glad to be home.