Our Trip to Ethiopia--Part 1, The Journey

We've been home for two weeks now and I realize that it's taken me a while to get around to posting about our trip, but I had a few obstacles in my way.  Number 1, we didn't have internet at our house, so getting to a source of internet in a place where I could think was pretty much impossible.  Number 2, it's really taken me this long to process everything we experienced during those 8 days.  Number 3, truthfully, getting it all written down and properly documented seemed like a daunting task to me!

So here goes......we will start at the very beginning......

When I was working with the adoption travel agent, we used Susan Parr who were wonderful by the way, I was trying to decide many things, one of the things was what airline to use.  One one hand you have Ethiopian Air, they fly from Washington Dulles to Rome for just a refueling and then on to Addis Ababa Ethiopia.....you get on the plane in Washington and don't get off until you land on Ethiopian soil. This is a long 15+ hour flight.  On the other hand you have Lufthansa Airline who flies from many places in the U.S. to Frankfurt Germany, with various layover times, then on to Addis Ababa Ethiopia.

 
My thought on flights was this:  A long 15 hour flight would be brutal.  We flew to California once and I thought the 5+ hour flight for that was heading on torture.  I don't like to even get up out of my seat to go use the restroom, but I do, of course....so I knew that I would be stuck sitting down for a VERY long time!  I also thought about Todd.....he 6' 7" and leg room in economy class is non-existent for someone over 6 feet tall.  As I was milling all of this over, Kathy, our agent at Susan Parr let us know that Lufthansa was actually offering cheaper flights than Ethiopian Air if we left from our local airport!  I was stunned!  We hardly ever fly out of our local airport because it's always more expensive.  We usually drive to Detroit or Chicago and fly from there.  This sold me.  We wanted the convenience of flying out of and returning to our home town but never even gave it a thought because of the price we thought we would have to pay!  We knew that we would be paying more to do this on our second trip because we wanted friends and family be able to meet us at the airport if they would like to.  We just figured, why pay the higher cost twice, we would go the cheaper route when it was just Todd and I.

Grand Rapids MI

Our "Fun Passes"  ;)

In Chicago waiting for our flight to Frankfurt.

A Lufthansa plane.

A view of the inside of our plane, fully equipped with personal video screens.

So we flew Lufthansa which was a nice airline although I have a couple of complaints.  One complaint was how spacious the business and first class was....I mean ridiculously spacious.  I'm thinking that they could have taken a bit of room away from the "upper class", because obviously they couldn't possibly use ALL of that space they had, and given a bit more room to the economy class.  I'm sure this is how it is with all airlines though, but Todd's knees hit the back of the seats of the people in front of us!  He had to place pillows in front of his knees so it didn't hurt so bad.  The person in front of him couldn't even put his seat in the reclining position due to Todd's knees being in the way! Ugh.

A peek into our wonderful time in Germany.... 

Looks comfy, doesn't it?!  Todd had a whopper of a neck ache after that little cat nap! =(

Couldn't sleep.....AT ALL.  I was runnin' on adrenaline! 

Our gate and doorway to our final destination.

The bus we took to our plane.

We had to board the plane like this.  The Frankfurt airport was under construction in quite a few areas.

The other complaint I have with them is that they weren't very friendly.  I mean, we are talking Germans here.  They gave you a smile when they were talking to you but only because they were doing their job. There was no "small talk" or friendly chit chat going on at all.  It was very stiff and stoic feeling.  One funny thing though was that on one of our flights with them, one of the stewardesses kept talking to Todd in Dutch.  He somehow was able to skillfully answer any question she asked him....ok, he thinks it was skill, but I'm not going to tell him that it was only luck.  We couldn't figure out why she was speaking to him in Dutch until we were getting off the plane and Todd said something to her on the way out.  She said "You're not Dutch?"  "I thought you were Dutch....you look Dutch!"  He laughed and said no....and they talked a bit about why we were flying and where we were going.  The funny thing is Todd is actually 100% Dutch.....THAT's why she thought he looked Dutch and why she kept speaking Dutch to him!  And even funnier is that Todd didn't even think to tell her this!  Todd's parents and Grandparents are all 100% Dutch but have lived in the U.S. for at least a couple of generations so I don't think they really remember this on a daily basis.....none of them speak Dutch either.  That stewardess probably would have liked to known that she was right after all!  =)

A view of Frankfurt from the air.

We watched our progress throughout our flight. Here we are flying over Egypt.

This is the shot I got as we were over the Mediterranean Sea and Egypt.

Our trip over consisted of arriving at the GR airport 4 hours early since it was an international flight check in, flying to Chicago--1 hour flight-- and having a 4 hour layover there, flying to Frankfort Germany--7 hour flight-- and having a 6 hour layover there and then flying to Addis Ababa Ethiopia--8 hour flight.  Trip one equaled approximately 30 hours!  We left GR at 1:00 pm on Sunday Nov. 7 and by the time we got to Germany it was 11:30pm to us but only 6:30 Monday morning their time!  We were dead tired and wanted to sleep but we had a 6 hour layover to deal with instead.  =(  We were so glad to finally get to Ethiopia at about 9:00 Monday night.....we were sooo ready to sleep!  No melatonin needed!  All I can say is that I would never do that again.  I think that getting on a plane and getting over there with no wasted time is the best way to go.  At least by flying straight over there you can just go to sleep if you want to.  While we were sitting in Germany that's all I could think of!  Sleep, precious sleep!

The sun going down over Africa...

This covers two days of our trip.....more to come about our experiences while there and some surprising news  =)