18/365

No photo today... today was spent travelling in it's entirety. We left Bahrain just after 2 am, flying to London. The kids were good and slept the whole time from Bahrain until just before we got to London, when they brought around a breakfast service. We had a short layover at Heathrow, and then we were on to NY. Our ears started bothering us on this flight, the kids and I have head congestion and it's pretty bad. They did good on the flight, both taking a short nap. I got to watch The Duchess, which was very good. And I watched Ghost... ah Patrick Swayze, what a hottie.

When we got into NY the trouble began. We expected some delay, but since Ali has his green card now we thought it wouldn't be too bad. So wrong. We went through passport check and they said to Ali "you'll have to step into this room for a few minutes while we check something" and sent me to gather the baggage. I collected it all, and then went over to the immigration room. They had to call in to DC to check his name. Said it'd take a while. At this point, we started worrying we'd miss our flight, we only had 2.5 hours and we had to change airlines (from British Airways to JetBlue, and in Chicago we'd be changing from JetBlue to American). After 40 minutes it became obvious we'd be missing the flight. Time dragged on and on... and 2 hours and forty minutes later they finally cleared him! UGH. The kids were whiney and fussy and hungry at this point, I was starting to feel pretty sick and crappy. We figured we'd have to pay penalties for switching our flights, so we went over to JetBlue's terminal and got on the next (and last of the day) flight to Chicago. I was really feeling sick at this point: nauseated and having vertigo. Mostly from exhaustion. At one point while we were waiting to board our flight Ali took Elyas to the bathroom and Leila stayed with me. She told me she had to go but I was too sick to take her and couldn't leave the bags besides. She was putting on her shoes while I gathered up our things because we were about to board, and then I looked up and she was GONE. OMG I freaked! I started calling for her, but I'd already lost my voice so it wasn't very effective. It turned out she had run into the men's room looking for Ali, and came back out, but I was worried. One time Kevin got lost in the Atlanta airport and I was having flashbacks...

While we were waiting Ali called American to see if we could get on a flight to Cedar Rapids and they told him they were all booked for the rest of the night and we'd have to wait in Chicago until the 8 am flight! And here I was sick and worried I wasn't going to make it through the flight to Chicago...

It worked out okay, we got on the plane, got to Chicago and went to the American desk, and they DID have space on the next (and last once again) flight out. And they didn't charge us for the flight change or our overweight bags, which was very nice of the lady! We got into Cedar Rapids at 113o pm, and we took a taxi home and got in just after midnight. We were SO GLAD the trip was finally over!