Travel Day

This is the first of a series of posts I wrote while in Ethiopia for our court trip...finally getting around to blog posting!

Travel Day 10/29/2011 

We woke up at 2:15a.m…..oh wait…Nate woke up at 2:15 a.m….I never went to sleep because I was up packing last minute things and decided that I wanted to shower before we left.

Our plane boarded at 5:25a.m. left at 5:45 a.m. and the airline told us to arrive 3 hours early….sooooo we did. And the United airline desk didn’t open until 4:30a.m….so we just hung out in the middle of the night in the airport for no reason. Awesome!

By 5:10 we were making our way through security and I was freaking out that we would miss our flght…Nate was telling me to take a chill pill J

We made our flight and flew from Atlanta to D.C on a teeny plane through thunderstorms the whole way…and oh my goodness my stomach was dropping the whole time with the turbulence! I may or may not have shed a tear and squeezed Nate’s arm off….at least I never pretended to not be afraid of flying!

We made it to D.C when the ice and snow were dropping…Ate chipotle before 8:a.m. and boarded our plane to ETHIOPIA!!! Straight shot!

Ethiopian Air was super nice and huge and the stewardesses were all beautiful! The ride was super smooth besides a little bit of turbulence, but I was a big girl this time.

13 hours and some change later we arrived in Ethiopia at 7:45 a.m. on October 30th!

Our Flight Route

ETHIOPIA!!!!!

Ethiopian Air 

It was SO good to finally be on Ethiopian soil, but our very first experience in Ethiopia was a little stressful. We got our visas, exchanged our dollars for Birr and waited for our bags as they were the last to come off the belt and this was after the power was out and the belt wasn’t on for a while, but no worries…we got our many bags and headed towards the exit...

Well...exit we did not. 

We were eyed suspiciously and  could tell from across the room we were about to be given a hard time. Someone approached us about what was in all of our bags and we informed them that they were donations for our child's orphanage and transition house. They looked through our bags...sent us to one person then the next person and had us fill out numerous papers until they ultimately ended up taking our ALL of our formula donations! I was SO upset!! They told us we could come back tomorrow and pick it up ....that it had to stay there over night. I asked them what they had to do with it over night and they informed me "nothing".  Okay. That makes sense....not. This ordeal took about an hour and when you are trying to go meet your child as quickly as possible...a wasted hour is just about torture!!

We met Yonatan (our awesome driver and guest house manage) in the lobby...we were just thankful that he hadn't given up on us and left! We headed straight for the guest house to change and leave as quickly as possible to meet C.T!