The baby is taking a nap — the irony being that she’s a horrible napper at home, but now that there are things to do and places to go, she’s out cold in the hotel crib. Well, at least now I have time to blog about yesterday . . .
We had a 3am pickup from our house to catch a 5:30 flight to Abu Dhabi. We only packed 3 suitcases for 6 people for 2 1/2 weeks. The 4th bag that Bob is carrying is the baby crib. If you have a baby and you travel, you need the Baby Bjorn travel light crib. It weighs less than 7lbs and sets up in 10 seconds. We use it for her bed at home too cause for $230, we’re making sure we’re getting our money’s worth out of it. I know that sounds like a commercial, but just search for the video on YouTube and you’ll be sold on it like I was.
Late night + early morning = tired eyes.
While Josh was checking our luggage we found a lizard on the wall inside the airport. These little guy are all over Oman.
Getting squirrelly. They really are great travelers. They each have their own backpack with a sweatshirt (lesson learned from Frankfurt), snacks, books, camera and ipod touch/PSP. They pretty much do their own thing — order their own food and drinks on the plane, choose their own movies/video games. If they’re not fighting or tattling, I’m happy.
Waiting for our flight to take off. I have some video of Camille walking around the airport, but I don’t know if I can load it. If I can, I’ll put it here.
Waiting to take off. See my arm clenching the armrest? That is me having a brief mental breakdown. I was feeling fine and excited all the way up until we started to walk up the stairs to board the plane. I don’t know if it was the heat (it was 95 degrees at 5:30am) combined with wearing the baby and having not eaten or slept, but I started to feel flushed and sick and jittery like when you’ve pulled an all-nighter and drank too much coffee. Unfortunately, that’s also similar to how panic attacks feel when they first start and sometimes my brain can’t tell the difference.
So mentally my brain started forming escape plans:
“Quick, get out now before they shut the airplane doors!”
“You can’t do that, you’ve been planning this trip for months. Besides, there’s nothing to worry about.”
“But you’re going to be trapped on this plane . . . a tin box in the sky with no escape.”
“What is wrong with you? You haven’t felt this way in YEARS. . .”
Anyway, it caught me by surprise considering how much flying we’ve been doing lately and I’ve never felt even a hint of my former issues, even when we were being evacuated, but it was time to break out the yellow pills. I took 1/2 a pill and within 10 minutes felt like my normal self, just in time for take off. It doesn’t drug me out at all, it just silences the racing thoughts in my head and lets the rational side of my brain take charge. Ha ha. I really do sound like a nut. Anyway, thank God for yellow pills — klonopin, in case you’re curious. (I would be.) The 45 minute flight to Abu Dhabi was fine.
We had a 3 hour layover so we found a comfortable couch in Costa Coffee and had a snack and a cappuccino. On the way home we have a 6 hour layover in the middle of the night so I was scoping out a place to sleep next time. I’ve already called dibs on this couch.
I was really dragging and wanted to sleep this time, but there was too much going on and this baby was trying to walk everywhere.
Yummy and beautiful.
We boarded the flight to Turkey to find that it was only about 1/2 full. Hallelujah! I snagged a full row to myself (well, I was sharing it with Camille, but close enough) settled in face down, and stretched out flat for a nap. I slept through the meal, the drink, the snack, and who knows what else. I woke up enough times to know that time was passing, but was happily surprised to find that the flight passed quickly as I woke up for good only a short time before we started our descent. Baby slept a good chunk of time too.
Upon landing we flew through passport control with our diplomatic passports and made it to the luggage carousel about 10 minutes before they even started unloading the baggage. I always want to take a picture of the massive lines that we leave behind, but you don’t want to start flashing a camera when people are deciding whether to let you in their country or not, so I’ll just show you Josh’s expression after we cleared customs.
