Flashback: In which we arrive in Paris

Since we've had fairly dull couple of weeks here (somebody has been under the weather virtually every time we could have done something as a family), I thought that I would take the opportunity to blog about our trip to Paris.

Our flight to Paris left on a Sunday, but our trip from Manhattan began on Saturday afternoon. We had spent the morning frantically running around, packing last minute things and preparing our minivan to be stored over the year that we are going to be gone. Carrying boxes into the garage. Doing last minute cleaning. Around 1:00 we were essentially finished, and my dad ran out and picked up burgers and fries to eat for lunch.

Then we loaded all of our stuff into my parents' Taurus and my sister's Taurus, since they had agreed to drive us to Kansas City. Blaise, Cherry, and I rode with my dad, and Sapphire, Ezio, and my mom rode with Abby. We had made reservations at a hotel out by the airport with a pool, and so they dropped us off there. Then Blaise worked a bit while I took the kids down to the pool.

The next morning after breakfast we headed down to the shuttle and rode to the airport. Check in went smoothly, and we were thrilled to discover that our luggage could be checked all the way through to Paris (we were using two different airlines, so we were expecting to have to recheck it in Chicago) and that they didn't charge us for any of it. We wandered around the airport for a while, then cleared security and boarded the plane. We landed in Chicago without incident (except that Cherry decided that flying was terrifying and that she absolutely must hold both of my hands at all times).

Since we had a long (5 hour) lay over, and our next flight left from the international terminal (nothing to do, or buy) we looked around until we found a restaurant selling Chicago style hot dogs for lunch, then took our time heading over to the international terminal. Once there, we had to reclear security (of course) and we stopped at a small kiosk just inside security to pick up a few snacks for the plane and for the wait. We roamed the halls of the terminal. We explored a small safety exhibit set up by the Chicago childrens museum. Blaise and the big kids played their DS's. I followed Cherry up and down and up and down. Finally, we headed over to the gate and waited to board.

On the plane we discovered that we had four seats together, and a fifth across the aisle. There were 2 ways to handle this. The first was to sit Sapphire on the other side of the aisle. She didn't like that idea at all, and to be honest, neither did we. The second was to put Blaise over there, but he's quite a large guy, and we suspected that whoever was sitting next to him wouldn't like that very much. Fortunately, the man with the window seat was willing to go for option number 3, which was to take the 4th seat in our group, thereby leaving two seats together for Blaise and Sapphire. Cherry fell asleep almost immediately, and Ezio waited impatiently to be able to play his DS.

Eight hours later we landed in Dublin, where I discovered that Sapphire had stayed awake all night watching Bolt 3 times, and then fallen asleep while the plane was taxiing. We disembarked, then cleared passport control (I got my passport stamped!) and waited for our next flight. We got caught trying to take water through security (I'd forgotten that we'd filled our water bottle) and were given the choice of drinking it or tossing it. I drained the bottle and they let us through.

Our third flight took us to Paris, though I think everyone except Ezio slept through the whole thing. He played Lego StarWars. The flight attendant woke us up and made us sit properly for the landing.

To be continued. . .