Still not home

We can't seem to find a way to get all the way home this trip back to the USA! We have had a most terrible time. Our planes were changed in Tokyo and it caused us to arrive into San Francisco late thus missing our plane into Dallas where we arrived Friday morning after 24 hours of being up, I just have the hardest time sleeping on planes, thankfully, the boys have an easier time than I do. United (which I hate flying, just because of situations like these, and should have learned my lesson to fly any Asian airline, sadly they are so much more efficient and customer friendly than United by far) We were rescheduled around 11 a.m. to leave from San Francisco Friday at 7:30 p.m. requiring us to hang around the airport the entire day-I did get a temporary US phone and number #415-324-9969, we enjoyed a hamburger, and the boys managed to sleep some in the uncomfortable airport chairs. Our original plans were for Dustin and Nathan to fly on into Lubbock where Pappa Joe would pick them up and Ethan and I would stay in Dallas with Mom who was there for market. Because our Dallas-Lubbock flights were independent of our International travel American Airlines wanted to charge us $350/ticket to change their flight times on tickets that were only originally $114/ticket-can you say FRUSTRATING!! So I booked transfer flights for D&N on Southwest for $350 total departing on Friday morning.

In the afternoon a typical SF fog rolled into the airport and many flights were cancelled, including our long awaited one to Dallas, where we would meet Mom You can not imagine how many people were waiting in line for re ticketing, I would estimate that we waited in some sort of line at least 4 hours that day and remember I'm running on no sleep! I was so emotional, it took all I had to just keep from setting down and just bawling and probably would have if not for the boys because every time I started to tear up the boys would say, "MOM!!" Hopefully, in all the frustration I didn't lose my Christian witness too much! There was enough ugliness going around in those waiting lines for all of us combined and I stand amazed that anyone would take one of those airline ticketing jobs! I've also learned from setting in all those lines that a person should avoid flying into or through San Francisco in June or July because of all the fog issues! Not only was it foggy it was freezing! In the 50's, people outside had coats and hats on!! We finally were reissued new tickets departing San Francisco on SATURDAY and because ultimately our tickets were changed because of weather the airline refused to pay for any of our hotel accommodations, they did give us a discount voucher that I tried to redeem but was told that all the discount hotel tickets had already been issued in the San Francisco area! More Frustration!

When we finally had our tickets in hand and realized that we would be spending two unexpected nights in California we then had to wait in another line for our baggage to be found and reissued to us, it is now about 8:30 pm-I've been up over 48 hours at this point, I was on the brink of losing it but was encouraged by the boys who continued to have a good attitude through the entire ordeal, I kept thanking them for supporting and encouraging me through this little trial. I am amazed that out of the thousands of travellers after an 1 1/2 hours we had all our luggage in hand. A lesson learned-we received the three, royal, blue bags and floral bag within 30 minutes but it took an additional hour to retrieve the black bags from the sea of black bags I'm sure!

When we finally were in our taxi headed to the hotel we all made a conscious effort to change our thinking to the whole, "changing lemons into lemonade" mode! The boys have never seen San Francisco and we decided to just embrace the idea that we would be spending some time here. We finally were in bed by 11:30, I don't know that a bed ever felt any better. We all slept until 11 am the following day before an afternoon of sight-seeing. We are all up now at 2:30 in the morning, it is so hard getting your inner clocks converted over. We are just praying that we can finally get to our final destinations later this morning! and let me put a plug in for Southwest Airlines, they changed our tickets from Friday to Saturday for Dustin and Nathan with no charge! Man! if they only flew Internationally we might be home by now!!