Tuesday, October 9, 2001

DAY OF HELL!

I’m sometimes known for telling it like it is and saying that today was the day of hell just about sums it up! How ever bad we imagined today would be paled in comparison to how it actually was.  Here we go:

We finally finished packing at 1:30am and headed to bed. Andrew woke up at 2am and refused to sleep unless he was in my bed. The alarm went off at 5am and we got up and got ready for the day. At 6:30am the van arrived to take us to the airport. When we arrived at the airport we loaded up 3 car seats, 2 strollers and 2 carts full of luggage (you do the math when there are only 3 adults!)  We somehow wheeled everything to the ticket counter and must have looked really pitiful because they took us to the front of the line!  I was too exhausted and hot at this point to care what the people in line were thinking!  When we got to the counter we were informed that our assigned seats had been “dropped” and that the best they could do was 2 seats on the bulkhead and 3 seats FIFTEEN rows back!  We were REALLY annoyed!  Come to find out the bulkhead seats didn’t have a bassinet like I had been promised and that the 4 bassinets on the plane did NOT have babies sitting in front of them.  To make matters worse no one would trade with me!

Okay, so we’ve gotten our seat assignments (pitiful as they may be) so we’re off to the VAT office to reclaim some of the taxes we spent.  Come to find out 90% of the merchants did not give us the correct forms so we were only going to be getting back £4 when it would cost us £6 to process the forms!  Gee, a long line we didn’t need to stand in!  Now we’re off to the gate – we had barely gotten seated when they started boarding the plane.  They had tripled security and made men stand in one line and women in another so they could open and search your carry-on luggage.  I must have looked pitiful carrying a baby in a front pack carrier and holding two 2 year old’s hand because they waved me through without checking my diaper bag!

Now we’re inside the plane – I’ve got Andrew on my lap and Nathan beside me.  The entire time we’re taking off he’s screaming that he wants Poppy (who as you will remember is FIFTEEN rows behind us!).  The rest of the NINE hour flight was spent shuffling children between the two sets of seats, trying our best to get them to sleep and eat uneatable airline food.

Fast forward NINE miserable hours and we’re at the Orlando airport – ah home at last, or so we thought!  When you get off the plane you enter an area where you pick up all of your luggage.  You then have to schlep (yes that’s my word of the week) your luggage to customs where you show your passport.  You then schlep your bags to a security check point where they ask if you are carrying any fruit or baby food.  I was carrying baby food so they x-rayed my luggage, counting the jars of food, and then opened my luggage to account for each and every jar of food!  Yes they were sorting through my underwear!!!  Then we had to schlep our bags to a baggage drop off so they could send them to the ‘normal’ baggage claim area.  We thought our misery was done but then we had to go through yet another security check point where we ourselves were x-rayed!  Now please bear in mind that on the surface all of this doesn’t sound too terrible BUT we were three adults with 3 tired and cranky children, 3 car seats, 2 strollers and 14 pieces of luggage!  To make matters even more miserable all the airport personnel were looking pitifully at us but never once offered to help!

So now we’re through the security check points and we make our way to the telephones to call our rides.  Can you guess?  We had no American coins!  UGH!  We get change, make our phone calls and head to baggage claim where we once again had the horrible task of picking out our luggage.  Now we’re at the curb waiting for the car – it’s probably 80 degrees outside and we’re wearing 60 degree clothing!

We FINALLY made it home at 7pm! We ate dinner and got the boys dressed for bed.  On an ordinary day I wouldn’t tell you the following but I think it just adds a perfect ending to the “Day of Hell” – while I was changing Andrew he peed all over me!  He hasn’t done that in 6 months!  So at 10pm our 23 hour day is FINALLY over and we’re fast asleep!