The first thing in any big trip is the to-do list. We had a few, including this one.
Monday night we were all ready to go. Bags packed, children in bed, S.J. ready to drive us to the airport in the morning. If 4am qualifies as "morning" instead of "middle of the night"!
One last minute bit of excitement was our primary credit card being "closed" again, due to yet another "security breach" at some unknown online vendor (they never tell you who's to blame). That wasn't as bad as it might have been, because we had applied for an received another credit card just in case, before the trip.
So we felt pretty smart, until Alison went to pay our two pay-in-advance apartment rentals on PayPal. The first one went through fine, but something about a PayPal payment to a place in Turkey alerted our other credit card company, and they put a hold on the card instantly. Fortunately we were able to quickly resolve it, although it just goes to show that telling a credit card issuer about your trip to Turkey in advance doesn't solve anything.
We were in for a long day. Our first flight was scheduled to leave San Francisco at 6am to take us to Boston. We had a few hours in Boston, and then we'd fly to Munich for more than a 10 hour layover, before taking the flight to Tbilisi. We were leaving on the morning of June 14th and arriving at 3am on June 16th.
The kids were too excited to sleep on the first flight, so the Nintendo DS and the iPad were a big help. Vernon and Alison even played some Scrabble on the other iPad.
Unfortunately, not long after we went through security in Boston, we realized that the bag containing the DS and all of its games was missing. We had checked two bags through to Munich, so it was possible it had gotten into them somehow, but we were pretty sure we had seen it just outside of the security line. We asked the TSA people but they couldn't find it. Things were looking bleak for the remaining day and a half of travel, although Eero was being pretty big about it, at least for the moment.
Maybe it was good luck or maybe bad, but Logan airport has one of those big vending machines that sells iPods, headphones, batteries, and other technology tools. So our first souvenir of the trip (and the most expensive, it turned out) was a new DS and Super Mario Brothers cartridge. Of course it took a while to charge, but suddenly Eero was much more relaxed.
Our just desserts was that Eero slept almost the whole way to Munich. The rest of us took advantage of Lufthansa's excellent seatback entertainment system, and didn't take the opportunity to sleep.
We were pretty worn out when we got to Munich, but we still had a full day layover (about 12 hours) and then the flight to Tbilisi ahead of us!
