Safe and Sound

We have successfully left London and arrived in California. And since I have had a couple of days to recover, I figured I would let people know how the trip went. We flew on Friday and there is something about international flights that seem to need to involve the middle of the night. Our flight left at 6:50 from Heathrow. This doesn't sound too bad until you realize that we had to be at the airport at 5 and leave the house at 3:30 in order to get there by then. At least we had a ride from the airport from someone in our ward. We looked into taking the train but it didn't seem to go that early in the morning. But I get ahead of myself, going to the airport was not the start of the whole thing.

We had to pack first. Since we didn't have to pack up our dishes and furniture, it felt more like we were packing for a vacation. We put off the majority of it until Thursday and still made time to take one last trip into town to look at a few things (we love taking time off about 2/3 of the way through packing to do something fun, it really helps with morale and energy). As always seems to happen, we didn't have enough space for all of our stuff. Fortunately, we have great friends (Grant and Jana) who lent/gave us another suitcase.

The other problem was the crib box. When we bought Anna's crib, we kept the box so we could transport it but it's really quite large and it was not going to fit into the car we were getting a ride in, especially with all of our other luggage. So Jason left the night before to take it, by train, to the airport and leave it at a left luggage place. Grant also went with him to take one of our other big suitcases. While they were gone, Jana hung out with me and helped me and kept me company/helped me clean and finish up a few last packing things. This is when she lent/gave us the extra suitcase when it became apparent our stuff was not going to fit into what we had.

While we were working on that, Jason gave me a call. He was at the airport and it turned out that the place where we were going to take the box, was not going to be open until 6 am. This didn't seem like it was going to work out for us so after a bunch of talking and thinking of options (and reassuring Jason that I would be ok), we decided to have Jason just stay at the airport. To help me, Jana stayed and napped on our couch. These people really do deserve a medal. So with her help, we got everything packed and in the car and even had a bit of a nap.

The first leg of our journey was a short, one hour flight to Dublin (on an Irish airline) on which we all slept pretty much the whole way. After an hour and a half layover, we got on a long flight to San Francisco. We were a little concerned about our seats because we did the self-check in and didn't know if we would have a bulkhead seat (the best seat for babies in long international flights). Fortunately, not only did we have a bulkhead seat but we were the only people in that row so we had four seats to ourselves. This was a ten and a half hour flight and Anna did SO GREAT!!! She managed short, one hour naps through the flight and was happy. We also spent a fair amount of time walking up and down the aisles (I have never spent so much time up and about on a flight, it must have been so good for me) and getting to know the whole flight staff.

We landed in San Francisco after a smooth flight and after getting through immigration and getting our luggage, we had to pick up a rental car. We had arranged to rent a car and drive down to San Luis Obispo as the last leg of our journey. Since we had so much luggage, we decided to send Jason to get the car and I waited at the arrivals door with Anna. After watching closely at every car that drove by for about an hour, Jason came walking from the direction he left. I had the credit card which he seemed to need to get the car. So we wheeled ourselves to the car rental place and got the car. In spite of all of our time in countries where they drive on the left hand side of the road, Jason quickly adjusted to the right side of the road so we arrived safely at around 7 pm. With the time change, we ended up being in-transit for 23 1/2 hours.