Coming to America

I haven’t written yet about our trip last week from Taiwan to Virginia because…well, I think I was trying to repress the memory.

I’ve decided to do a quick rundown of the nuts and bolts of what it takes to fly from Asia to the East Coast of the US, and then later share a few stories from our trip. The stories are more fun anyways.

The Trip included a one hour ride to the airport. Waiting. A three hour plane ride to Tokyo, Japan. Waiting…three hours in that airport. Thankfully it was a nice airport. The bathrooms were so cool! Automatic everything.

Next was the Long Flight: 11 hours across the Pacific Ocean. Landed at LAX. (worst airport on the planet!) We had 2 hours at LAX to haul our two children and four large suitcases from the international terminal to the domestic terminal, recheck our bags and find our gate.

We took a one hour plane ride to Las Vegas. A forty minute layover there meant we found our next gate and boarded our plane immediately.

Then it was 5 or 6 hours from Vegas to Raleigh/Durham North Carolina. This flight took forever. I remember looking out the window halfway in and thinking, “We land at 11pm, but the sun is still out. If it’s still light out we can’t even be close.” I felt like crying.

Once we landed in North Carolina we had another 3 hour drive to my parents house.

If anyone’s counting, that’s about 30 hours of total travel time. When we got to California we were barely over halfway there! This really is a big country.

You might also notice there was no time for eating from the time we hit LA until we got out of the airport system. Thankfully most of that time was “night” for us, so we weren’t very hungry. We also had snacks with us. But we all ended up pretty dehydrated. I still feel dehydrated.

Other notable events included airsickness, not getting the bulkhead seats we requested and being Those People on our cross-country flight. You know, the ones with the loud, crying kids that cause people to start breaking out earplugs.  We were probably the smelly ones too. Glad to give everyone something to talk about.

Then again, even though the trip in itself is grueling. Harrowing. Even though doing it with young kids makes it even more…harrowing. Even though all of it, I remember on our Long Flight when they turned on the lights for breakfast, Ellie and Abram had both just woken up, Abram smiled BIG and Ellie giggled and then all four of us were smiling and laughing. And I looked at all the other travel weary people around us, and realized that as tiring as it was to be playing puzzles or jiggling babies instead of sleeping or watching the in-flight movie…at that moment we were also the only ones smiling.