Oh, and her neighbor's car. It's a Ford Ka (pronounce like what a crow says...Kaaa). The most popular brands of cars I saw out there seemed to be Vauxhall, like our rental, VW, and Ford of all things! This Ka should have been named the Ford Pimento, because it looks like a cross between a Pinto and a Gremlin.
Hyrum drove the car, without following Daisha, and did an impressive job. Well, at least for the part I saw. I slept most of the hour drive from staying up so late last night. After driving so much in England for 2 and a half weeks, we were getting used to the left side of the road thing, and it almost felt natural. Almost. We saw more interesting things on the road. Trailers are pulled by small cars, and horse trailers are actually motor home looking things rather than a truck pulling a trailer. This is the only regular horse trailer we saw, but look at what's pulling it!
We didn't have a car seat for Talea since she had borrowed Tabitha's booster, so she was in just a seat belt. Being the car seat fanatic I am (I'm a Britax fan), that kind of freaked me out, but I handled it...mostly because I was asleep. I didn't want to make Daisha follow us to the airport just to retrieve her booster.
Hyrum dropped us off at the terminal, so we waited for him to return the rental and catch a shuttle to meet up with us again.
By the way, our rental was diesel and was averaging 39 mpg. Pretty darn nice for a 7 passenger vehicle and how much we drove and the outrageous price of their fuel (petrol).
When Hyrum arrived, we tried to check in, but of course things couldn't go smoothly like in San Fransisco. SF had no lines, we breezed through everything, sat together on the plane, the kids slept almost the entire way, and we were thrilled with the service. Our trip home was the complete opposite. I swear that by going to England we entered the twilight zone with how many freaky weird things, or lame things, happened to us.
-The terminal was packed.
-It took ages to check in.
-We had to get on a shuttle and drive to Timbuktu to board our plane.
-We waited something like 15 minutes, or so it felt, in the shuttle while they moved the stairs.
-We had to climb stairs like the president to get on the plane, so we had to wait at the bottom while all the shuttles unloaded since we had 3 kids, a carry-on, a car seat, a stroller, and a backpack carrier (Daisha gave hers to us).
-They wouldn't put our stroller up on the plane for us, they put it underneath.
-Someone put our carry-on on board for us, and it took us forever to find it.
-They didn't seat us together.
-I was seated with Kiersa at the bulkhead with a lady to my left and a middle-aged couple to my right. How the heck did they get to sit in the bulkhead without kids!? The computer wouldn't let us select those seats unless we had another lap infant. No one was willing to trade us seats.
-Hyrum and the kids were seated a row behind and to the left so I had to gesture to get his attention if I needed help.
-I was trapped by the baby cots and couldn't get out without making a huge production of it.
-Hyatt peed his pants twice and went through all the spare clothes until he was wearing Talea's pink accented jeans, and one of the times he peed, he peed on Hyrum's lap.
-Hyrum didn't have spare clothes.
-Kiersa threw up all over the place during dinner, and the lady next to me freaked out because she thought Kiersa was choking (though she wasn't). The smell of vomit was mingling with the smell of chicken and vegetables, which didn't combine well.
-Kiersa's vomit got all over my leg, and I didn't have spare clothes.
-Hyatt's TV wouldn't work, and Hyrum's was on the fritz doing strange things.
-Everyone's headphones would scream loud fuzzy sounds in their ears if the movie would get shut off, but when you watched the movie, you could barely hear it and had to press it against your ears most of the movie.
-The flight attendants barely pretended we existed, except to tell me I had to go back to my seat and not let Kiersa sit on the floor.
-There was turbulence.
-Tilly kept pushing on the seat in front of her with her feet, annoying that person, but of course she didn't want to trade seats because she had leg room.
-The kids hardly slept and Kiersa cried a lot (for her, since she rarely cries).
-They didn't bring our stroller to the plane exit. They sent us on a wild goose chase to find it, and when we couldn't find it, they said they'd sent it to oversize luggage so we had to tote all the sleepy kids, the stroller saddle bags, the jackets, the car seat, the carry-on, and the backpack carrier all the way to the luggage pick up before we could have our hands free. Misery!!! Hyatt was crying the whole while to be carried, but it's so hard for me to carry him now with my carpal tunnel. If they didn't breeze us through customs, I was going to scream!
-We sort of breezed through customs, but had to stop at the agriculture place and explain about the farm we'd visited, in case we brought manure on our shoes or something.
And yet, with all the crud that happened, people came up to us at the end of the flight and told us how great our kids were and that theirs never would have been so good. If only they'd seen what angels they were on our first flight, they would be singing a different tune. I felt like the frazzled mom on the flight that Bill Cosby talked about.
Lest you think I'm all doom and gloom, there were a couple of good things:
-There were sterilizing toilet wipes on the flight so I didn't have to freak out about nasty bathrooms.
-The dinner was better than on the way out.
-They didn't lose our luggage or break anything.
-The people seated by me were nice and helpful.
Angi was coming to pick us up, and when she arrived, she informed us that her household was afflicted with croup. Oh boy. Just what we needed after a flight like that. We got to her house and I had to be the bad guy asking the kids not to kiss Kiersa and not let my kids play with their friends. I felt so bad. They're such loving kids and they all were excited to see each other. We went to bed at 8:30 that night because we were on England time, which meant it felt like 4:30 in the morning for us. We were beat.
1 comment:
I'm glad you had fun at our house, we loved having you. Sorry you had so much jinx on the way home though. Sounds miserable.
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