Ebb-Insanity

We’ve been relatively nutty the past few days, even for us, with travel, jetlag, and settling in.  Hence, the lack of blog updates.  So, we’ll try to get caught up over the next couple of days here.

First up:  the flight over.  It’s a long story why we flew Icelandair, but we did.  And because we did, we got to see Iceland for an hour.  And because we did, we couldn’t check our bags all the way through to Ljubljana; instead, we needed to claim our luggage in Paris, haul it to another terminal, and check it in with Air France for the final leg.  We found this out when we got to the Minneapolis airport.  Great start to the trip.

After that, the first two legs of our flight went fairly smooth.  The kids actually slept a bit on the plane, occupied themselves with TV shows, and didn’t completely disrupt anyone else’s flight.  We also got to see a beautiful sunrise/sunset (???) on the way across.  Then we arrived in Paris...

If you’ve never been to Charles de Gaulle Airport, picture a sprawling metropolis larger than most Midwestern towns, where the terminals are miles apart.  Then picture a husband and wife, each pushing a cart piled high with suitcases, bags, and booster seats, trying to manage three overtired kids and trying to figure out where to go and how to get there.

The short of it is that we got where we needed to go, but nearly maxed out our credit cards on the way.  There was no way to take airport transportation with all of our stuff, so we hitched a 50-euro taxi from Terminal 1 to Terminal 2, or about 25 euros a mile (which was either a total rip-off or well worth the money, depending on whether you consider the effort required of the taxi driver or the effort it saved us).  Air France then charged us 55 euros to check each of the kids’ booster seats as extra bags, which is more than we paid for the seats (again, either a total rip-off or well worth the money, depending on whether you’re able to ignore the fact that you’re getting ripped off and assume you’re somehow accumulating karma points).  We then spent another 50 euros on a couple of sandwiches for lunch (this was pretty much a total rip-off no matter how you look at it) and continued our hitting streak of at least one spilled milk per airport meal.  After all of this, we settled in for the rest of our seven-hour layover. 

The good news is that we finally made it to Ljubljana in one piece.  Everyone got some sleep during our layover (see the progression of snoozers below) in Paris and again on the flight to Ljubljana.  Maybe that was us cashing in some of our earned karma.  We got to our apartment about 11pm local time, got everyone to bed and asleep somewhere around 2 or 3, and we all slept until noon the next day.