In Transit and In His Grace

We are back in the U.S.A., and actually we are here in St. Louis, our future home. I will write a post about our first impressions of this city probably later this week--when hopefully I have had a little time to process them--but this post is about the kind of insane last four? five? days of our lives as we traveled from our old home in Asia to this upcoming one. Just FYI, this post is not necessarily about how we are feeling about the transition or dealing with it, because really the last few days haven't left a lot of time for feeling or thinking or dealing, just rolling with the punches. :) Still, we have seen God give us some really cool blessings, and had some really crazy and hilarious stuff happen. So, I'm just going to do this list style:

• Blessing: Sarah did really, really well on all the flights! She had a few whiny and difficult moments, but in general, this time was SO much easier than a year ago! She loved the first flight and spent half of it looking out the window and commenting on all she saw. She apparently (unlike her mama) thinks flying is a blast. As we were getting off the 16-hour flight from Shanghai to New York, she said, "Mommy, can we go airplane again?" David and I did not share her enthusiasm.
• Hilarious: There was a man on our long flight, a few rows ahead of us, who had sinus issues like I have never heard before. And this is coming from someone with serious sinus issues! He started snoring before while we were still on the ground in Shanghai, and I think he could be heard throughout the entire economy section! He snored for probably 70% of the flight, louder than I could have imagined it was possible to snore. It was unbelievable.
• Crazy: Everything went smooth till we got to New York, and then everything started to go wrong. first of all, we arrived almost 2 hours late--our 4.5 hour layover nearly cut in half. Then it took nearly two hours for them to get our baggage off the plane and onto the carousel! Meanwhile, there was a huge thunderstorm that came up (probably caused the delay with the bags) which, somehow, caused a sudden geyser of water, no lie, to burst up from under the floor of the baggage claim area a few feet from where we were waiting for our bags. Seriously, the water was spraying up from this grate in the floor, 5-6 feet in the air, and quickly flooded a huge portion of the waiting area. This sort of thing is very surreal and very amusing when you are jetlagged!
• More Crazy: So, when we finally get our bags and go through customs, we have only 30 minutes to catch our flight from New York to Dallas. We are hopeful because we heard the thunderstorm caused a bunch of delays, but we are still hustling through. Just the day before we left, I called U.S. Airways to confirm that our baggage allowance would be the same for our domestic flights as the international, and the lady also told me that it would be super easy to quickly re-check our bags right outside the international customs area at JFK at a U.S. Airways kiosk. As we exit, I see Delta and several other airlines' little kiosk, but no U.S. Airways. David is pushing one cart loaded sky high with luggage with one hand, and Sarah's stroller with the other hand. I am leaning all my body weight into controlling my piled-high luggage cart, and an airport employee informs me that U.S. Airways does not, in fact, have a kiosk here so we must transport our luggage ourselves, in less than 30 minutes, from Terminal 1 (where we were) to Terminal 7 (U.S. Airways domestic). To make the long and annoying story of this luggage journey short, we got it done, exhaustedly and not always with a good attitude, only to discover our domestic flight had not been delayed, but CANCELLED, and we could only be re-booked on the same 6:15 p.m. flight the next day . . . Oh, and then we found out that there were no hotel rooms to be had for less than $300 a night in the airport vicinity . . .
  
• Blessing: So, we called David's parents who were a 3-hour drive away in Connecticut and begged them to come pick us up. We felt horrible to inconvenience David's dad with a sudden, late-night 6 hour drive, but they were so incredibly gracious to come rescue us, and excited to see us, and we were thrilled to see them! In the end, we were so blessed to spend a few hours with them (originally, we weren't planning to get to see them till August sometime), and get to sleep and shower in their comfortable, familiar, wonderful Connecticut home! We had real New England Dunkin Donuts for breakfast in the morning, and just such a precious and unexpected blessing to get to see them for a few hours!

Anyway, that was day one-ish (I guess the total time represented by this post was more like 48 hours, but you know what I mean), there were more adventures and blessings headed our way the next day! Stay posted . . .