This year I tried to save us money by going thru Moscow on our way back to the USA. I spent hours upon hours researching asking questions about visa before finally deciding to purchase the tickets 5 months in advance. After purchasing the tickets I would hear from others that you need a visa and you don’t need a visa; you can check your bags all the way thru and you can’t. I even went so far as to almost purchase a Russian visa just to transit thru the airport, but decided against it. After all that planning, who knew our trip would turn out like this.
We were to leave on a Tuesday morning at 7:10 am. We got to the airport in Atyrau to discover that the flight was delayed two hours so we went back home. Two hours later we went back to the airport and discovered that the flight was delayed another hour so we decided to wait this time. Stacey has some french fries that comes with mayonnaise and a cappuccino. After two hours of waiting and asking many people about the status of our flight, we were concerned. The people in the airport did not seem to know anything and I am sure the language barrier did not help so we started calling people who could call the airline for us. We finally decided to go back home since the flight coming from Moscow had not left for Atyrau and that was the plane we would take back going to Moscow. People kept calling and calling and not even the airline knew what was going on until finally we found out that the flight was cancelled.
Stacey started researching other options and looking into the reasons for the delay in Moscow. She found out that Moscow had a major power outage over the weekend, bad weather had cancelled flights, and had stranded many people in the airport over 24 hours. People at the airport had even forced their way into restricted areas since they had run out of food and water. If we had made the flight later in the day, we would have missed out connecting flight to Houston and would have had to sleep at the airport and deal with all those problems since we didn’t have a visa to get out of the airport. God was looking out for us on that one.
The airlines did not know when we were going to leave and the next schedule flight to Moscow was not until Friday so we thought we need to look into another way. We cancelled our flight to Houston and had to pay a cancellation fee of over $600, but the flight to Moscow was reimbursed fully due to the situation. We then booked a flight thru Amsterdam and since the connection was only one hour and weather being bad we booked the connecting flight to Houston on Thursday instead of Wednesday.
Another rough night sleep and we were back at the airport on our way to Amsterdam. For once everything went smoothly and we thought we may be able to make the quick connection to Houston a day earlier. We ran thru the airport and made it to the gate well in advance, but only to find out that since we booked non-changeable tickets we couldn’t get on and we would have to overnight there. Normally I would research hotels, things to do, and so on well in advance, but I didn’t have time so we booked a hotel from the airport and got a decent place to stay. We had lots of time to do something so we took the train into the city center. It was cold and we did not have lots of clothes so we didn’t get very far without thinking about turning back. Also that part of Amsterdam is not very “kid friendly” so we stopped in for pancakes. On our way back to the hotel, we stopped at the airport to check in for the next day’s flight and get our seats. We were all good to go except there was a problem with Cameron’s ticket and come to find out he was selected for a random security check and we would have to wait until the next day to get it settled. What would at 8 year do to need this and what is the world coming to?
We made it thru the security check and had no problems getting on the plane. Then on the plane my row did not seem to have its video entertainment working properly. This meant no movies or tv shows for 9 hours. This seems to always happen to me so I got aggressive and asking to reset my row. After two resets and my unhappiness building, the flight attendant said there were two seats on the last row of the plane in the two middle seats. Desperation set in and I took it to the back and watched two not so great movies while Mason sat next to me watching his. We finally made it back to the US after 70 hours of stress and over $4,000 more. God has his plan for us and we made it safely is what I keep telling myself.
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