First Trip-Travel

Alright, time to relive our trip!!

Sunday, May 29th-Our flight plan was to leave Indy at 6 am, arrive in DC at 7:33 am, and then depart DC for Addis Ababa, Ethiopia at noon, arriving into Ethiopia the next morning at 7:45 am (their time). I had petitioned unsuccessfully to take a flight the evening before so we didn't have to get up super early and start our trip sleep-deprived, but my husband (being the cheapskate that he is) felt strongly we shouldn't pay for a hotel room if we didn't have to. Boo! So up we were at 3:30 am...yuck (but totally worth it, of course!). We'll see if I can't win that battle for the next trip :)

We had almost everything packed up the night before. Three of our pieces of checked luggage were full of donations, and then we had one big suitcase with our personal things to check, plus a laptop bag (thanks Ben and Shari!), camera bag, rolling suitcase, and backpack all to carry-on. Here are our 3 donation bags:


We got up, dressed, and headed to my parents' house. My wonderful mother had stayed at our house the night before so the boys were all set, and my wonderful father had offered to drive us to the airport so we wouldn't have to park our car in long-term parking. We got to the airport at 4:30 am, unloaded, and got ready to begin our journey!! We were able to check our baggage without problems (I'd been a little worried they wouldn't check it all the way through to Ethiopia, which was completely wasted worry), and headed to our gate. Here we are waiting to start boarding:


Our plane ride to Dulles was short and sweet. We had about 4 1/2 hours to kill until our flight to Addis, so we found some nice, long, deserted benches and both laid down and took naps for an hour or so. Then we got up and navigated a maze of a tram, shuttle bus, and about 40 escalators to get to the terminal we'd be leaving out of. We walked around for a while to find breakfast, and finally settled on Max and Erma's. Yum! We had been waiting for the Godwins, the other family traveling with us, to arrive, and luckily they did just as we picked our restaurant, so they joined us and we had a nice meal together. We were all excited and happy to finally meet after months of e-mails and phone calls!

Apparently they began boarding the flight way earlier than the 30 minutes ahead of time that we're used to, and by the time we got on, most of the plane was full. We weren't able to get much overhead space, so unfortunately most of our carry-ons went under the seats. We learned a lesson for the return trip!


We sat next to a woman going on a mission trip to Zimbabwe, and although she wasn't very talkative, she was quiet and didn't take up a lot of space...good enough! Our flight was uneventful, but the poor Godwins weren't so lucky and got bitten up by some kind of bug throughout the flight, and had people vomiting on all sides of them. We each watched a couple of movies, read a little, and slept a little. The meals were pretty "eh". Don't we look awesome?


After only 13 hours (!) we finally arrived in Addis, 30+ minutes after we were supposed to.


We disembarked outside and took a bus to the terminal, where we met up with the Godwins and stood in a VERY long line to get our Visas. While we were waiting, JW and I exchanged money and got loads of birr. We all met another adoptive family with a different agency who was there to pick up their new child and bring him home, so we asked them tons of questions. We got our Visas after waiting 30-45 minutes in line, and headed off to find our luggage. There was momentary panic when we had only 3 of our 4 pieces, and the one missing was the one with all of our personal items. We had plenty of soccer balls, children's clothes, formula, and candy, but none of our clothes or toiletries. After a little while of searching Chad was able to track it down. Whew!

We were unprepared for our luggage to be x-rayed before we could leave the airport, but it was, and it was an ordeal. I think the person running it was looking for laughs, so he kept purposely running the belt back and forth to dump all the luggage onto the floor on each end. Fabulous. A porter jumped in and grabbed all of our things before we could tell him not to, and promptly broke the handle off of our brand-new suitcase. Awesome. Then he got angry with us for not tipping him enough! Luckily we loaded up our cart and headed out of the baggage claim, where our agency's in country director, Woudneh, was waiting for us. He was with an eye doctor who was there for a medical mission trip, also through our agency, and was trying to get a ton of eyeglasses he had brought released from customs. So he got us to our van, we met our driver, and then he left and we headed to the guest house. We were on our way to the guest and transition house, and even better, our daughter!!