the flight.....s

We are here.

Three airplanes.

Four airports.

Twenty three hours.

Quito, Ecuador to Berkeley, California.

(and now, Fairfiled)

We left the house at 4:00 a.m., Quito time.

Lucy is a good little traveller.

She loved taking the sky train in Miami.

 She enjoyed my treasure jar at the airport in Miami, too (for about 2 minutes).

 She, in full completely-exhausted-going-into-hyper-mode, crawled the carpets in Los Angeles.

 And gave a lovely concert to any who would listen, including "I'm a Little Teapot".

 Tip me over.

 Pour me out.

 We had a delicious dinner at Chili's.

 We argued about whether the red and green things on the paper liner of her basket of enchilada soup were strawberries or chilies.

My argument was based on the fact that the restaurant was called Chili's, therefor they would have a chili as a logo.  Apparently she thought that was dumb.  Everyone knows that a red somewhat heart-shaped item with a green leafy top is a strawberry, regardless of what the name of the restaurant is.

Duh!

After dinner, we began the hunt.

The hunt involved looking around every post, along every wall, over every Samsung promoting charge center, to find an available outlet.  We participated in the hunt in Miami as well and were completely unsuccessful.  It is no small task with everyone trying to plug in their computers, ipods, blackberries, cellphones (although apparently a plan old cell phone hardly exists anymore....) and ipads in for their layovers.

All I wanted was to plug in my little laptop so that I could chill out my six-year-old who had been up for 18 hours by watching a princess movie of some variety.

It took a while to find one, and it was singularly occupied by a man who had his blackberry - or some type of thingy like that - plugged in.  He had it plugged in the top outlet and the charger covered the bottom one.  He seemed rather put out when I asked if it was all right if I moved his charger to the bottom so that I could access one for my little laptop.  Apparently it is not cool for a completely exhausted mother of an even more completely exhausted (can one be even more exhausted than completely exhausted??) six-year-old to very politely ask an oh-so-incredibly important business man to not hog an outlet so that at least one (or two, in this case) person out of about three thousand can be relieved of their hunt.

Not bitter.  No, not me.

So we did get settled down, snuggled up and cozied against the tiled wall and in-door-out-door carpeted floor to watch a delightfully engaging "Princess Stories" movie.

 So delightfully engaging was it, that Lucy fell asleep within fifteen minutes.

Ah, peace.

Unfortunately I couldn't be one of those hundreds who were on line after she feel asleep.  Little did I know that you had to pay for internet - getting a pass word to get on.  I was not about to wake up my angel to go find this kiosk! 

 Plus then I would have to start the hunt all over.

Besides, it was 10 minutes before departure.

Never before has any child of ours been so completely dead-to-the-world.  When it was time to board, I had to load both of our backpacks and my large purse-type-thing on my back and then try to pick up this child of mine and haul her to the boarding gate (quite a ways away - the hunt dictates that it is very likely that you will not end up anywhere near your gate).  May I remind many of you that Lucy is our child who broke the Ackermann mold..... she is not the slight, waif of a child that her three older siblings are.

No time to be polite.

I walked straight up to the front of the line, gasping for breath and arms throbbing, looked at the people in the line withe the most pathetic look I could muster (it came rather easily at this point) and they all kindly stepped aside and let me through.

We stumbled onto the plane - Lucy's 100 pound frame still dangling from my rubber arms - and I managed to plunk her not very gently down into her seat.

She stayed asleep almost the entire flight.

Once again, God is a God of miracles, people.

I forgot something important.

In Miami, they asked for people to take bumps, offering $300 vouchers.  Naturally, I jumped at the chance.   We could definitely use $600 of travel vouchers! Even though we were one of the first to volunteer, we ended up not getting it because they were not sure if they could then get us from LAX to SFO (that's cool world traveller talk for Los Angeles to San Francisco).

In L.A., our flight was delayed for a 1/2 hour because we had to wait for the flight from Miami - there were 20 people who needed to make the connection.  Yes, this was the flight that we would have been on if we would have been given the bump.

Bitter.

We also had a bag lost.  But you know, one out of four ain't bad.
(No, I didn't pack four bags for the two of us - it is gifts, Mia's clothes, Cade's clothes, Lucy's clothes and my clothes, all right?  There will almost none of it that will be going back with us.)

We arrived at 3:00 a.m. Quito time.
Yup almost an entire day.
But we are here.  And we are glad.