Six hours

So C's flight left here at 7:40 this morning. It's supposed to be a 2:20 flight. He arrived in Chicago six hours later. Weather in Chicago. Have I ever mentioned that we hate flying through Chicago for this very reason? They diverted him to Indianapolis and he arrived more than 4 hours later than he should have.

I have four hours between flights tomorrow in Chicago and the weather is expected to be much the same only with slightly less winds. Maybe not as many thunderstorms. I hope. It's supposed to dry out a bit in Chicago sometime tomorrow evening, so at least maybe if I can get to the 7:30 pm flight, we won't be delayed leaving. I can only hope that I get to that flight. I moved my flight up by 45 minutes, but all the morning flights are booked. C seems to think that with four hours, I should maybe be okay, but I don't like that "maybe". Maybe isn't going to work.

If I'm not on that 7:20 flight tomorrow night, the whole itinerary falls apart and I can't get there in time. They've said it won't be okay for one of us to be there Wed. morning and the other to arrive later, but maybe they would make an exception due to weather delays. And that makes me feel better, except that I've heard that this region does not like to stray from their procedure and runs a tight ship.

The other big issue there is that our flights on American and Aeroflot are unrelated...we are not booked straight through to our final destination. We have one roundtrip journey to Frankfurt and back and a separate journey from Frankfurt to Russia and back. It had to be done. So if I don't make our first Aeroflot flight in Frankfurt, they have no reason to bump me up on the list to catch another flight. To them I am not a passenger making a connection that got delayed by weather. I'm just another passenger starting my journey in Frankfurt.

Could this be any more complicated?

I guess it can't hurt to try to get on an earlier flight. If I am on one of those planes, I will get priority landing, I guess, while the 1:00 flight might be forced to wait for the morning flights to be channeled in. I seriously doubt I'll be able to get on a morning flight, though...they are booked solid due to the weather issues today and it doesn't help that it's Monday morning, a big travel time for business people.

C arrived in western Michigan at his meeting site 10 hours after his flight took off this morning and he got to the airport a bit over an hour before his flight. He's burned out from the ordeal and has a meeting tonight he needs to do including dinner with someone. I know he'd like to just go crash at the hotel. Unfortunately, we have an 18 hour journey coming up tomorrow night through two more layovers and that's going to be so much worse. My 1pm flight tomorrow leaves 26 hours before we arrive at our final destination, and if I get to DFW at 6am tomorrow to start doing stand-by, well, I'm not sure I even want to do the math on that.

Suffice it to say I may be exhausted before we ever even board the plane tomorrow night. Maybe that will help me sleep, because I do not ordinarily sleep well on planes at all. And an extra 7 hours tomorrow in an airport tomorrow means I need to think about trying to take one more ball of yarn. Maybe a ball of sock yarn and a complicated pattern. I always have this ridiculous fear that I may run out of yarn, but this time...this time it could happen. I'm taking mostly fingering weight yarn because space is at a premium in our luggage, and I'm going to save the emergency ball of worsted that I am taking for our Aeroflot flights because I'm planning to knit that with my yellow Papermate mechanical pencils. Seriously. Take a look sometime...they are totally good knitting needles. Especially with the pocket clip broken off. The Russian TSA appears to allow knitting needles, but Aeroflot does not. But nobody bans pencils. Which fails the logic test, but there you go. Security theater in a nutshell.

At this point, I just want to be in Russia. Seriously. I know I should be appreciating the miracle of flight and all (that was for you, Tasha), but right now I'm already over this whole journey. On the one hand, it is totally exciting and amazing that we will get to meet this adorable baby girl who could become our daughter, and on the other hand this week has just worn me down to a nub. I'm almost numb from the stress and the fire drills and the lack of sleep and it is hard to enjoy the process at this point. Once we get to the city we are going to, it will be so nice to stop worrying so much about each step of getting there and finally meet little N for the first time.

Now I need to find some energy and charge my camera batteries and get stuff ready to mail and go drop that stuff off. Not only do these crappy but "pretty" community mailboxes not allow me to mail scrapbooking swaps from home because they are bigger than letter size, but I also have to drop off a Fed Ex envelope in the drop box to get it to my China social worker because that crap is expiring next week.

DFW to Chicago, Chicago to Frankfurt, Frankfurt to Moscow, Moscow to the city little N is in. I'm going to try to blog at least once while we are there. See y'all on the other side.