THE trip to Angola!

We arrived in Angola!  The actual time in an airplane was 16 hours with a three hour layover in Brussels, Belgium.  About 22 hours of traveling.  Briant and I were happy to spend some time sitting after our last exhaustive efforts at packing everything up from our apartment.  

The night before, laying everything out, juggling things around to meet the weight restrictions.

Rhea of course, "undoing" one of my piles in her attempt to play "school" again.

 Of course we ended up with having to ship a few boxes of books & misc. that wouldn’t fit in our UAB packout 2 weeks ago, so we had a our wonderful “across the hall friend/neighbor,” Danielle, mail them for us because we ran out of time to borrow a car & get to the post office (our car was shipped a few days before we left).  We love Danielle and her family and glad we got to know them in the few months we had together.  Our kids absolutely loved playing together and Danielle and I loved to talk, although there’s just never enough time for that when you’re preparing to leave the country.  I’m glad though that we got to spend some time together when they came to church with us our last Sunday there, to see the Primary Program.  They are off to Romania next year after language training!

Danielle with two of her kids, Felix and Camille.  Here Camille is already wearing one of Rhea's shirts that we passed on to her because we're going to summer weather all year.  She and Rhea had such similar personalities--they loved playing together.  Both are the 3rd, and last children in their family.  :)

We didn’t think it was going to take that long to pack, but then we got going, and with trying to meet the weight requirements, had to do some creative juggling around of everything in order to have each bag under 50 lbs.  Our luggage scale was our best friend that day and surprisingly we found out at the airport that it was accurate!  We also had to clean out our apartment cupboards, fridge, etc. which had to be done last minute.  We handed off a lot of our food, clothes, etc. to Danielle and other friends.  Clothes like Rhea’s winter clothes that she needed in Virginia over the last month, she will not need here in Angola and will grow out of before she gets to use them again. 

Bri has half the bags here.  The other half were on a cart being pushed by one of the
airport staff to help us.

Rhea loves her new giraffe print bag.  Thought it was only appropriate that she and Savvy have bags that looked like animals we'll be seeing on a safari in Africa.  Savvy has a tiger print.

We literally finished packing everything up, passed things off to neighbors, and shut our door as the “Super Shuttle” pulled up.  Not surprisingly, I realized as we were pulling away, that I forgot to empty and pack a whole drawer of my bathroom stuff.  Live and learn.  L

The kids actually did very well on the flight, thanks to the movie and game selection on the individual screens in front of them (luckily they were distracted enough with their own screens that they didn’t pay attention to the rated R and PG-13 movies being played around them by other passengers.  Wish they could come up with a different child appropriate way to entertain everyone).  The flight started at 5:30pm, so my hope was that we could all sleep through most of the flight.  But unfortunately, noone slept that well even with melatonin that I gave them.  Too many distractions on the plane.  Thomas and Rhea had little cat naps here and there, as well as Briant and I.  Nothing of any quality that’s for sure.  The worst sleeper though was Savannah.  She had a hard time falling back to sleep after falling asleep for a half hour or so, and then waking up disoriented.  She never slept again for the rest of the trip!!  

Settling in right away...that didn't take long.  The kids picked these headphones and neck pillows out at Target from the cheap $5 bins.  Thomas loved the black.

Savvy was particularly excited about the meal on the plane.  It was so funny listening to her comments about the airplane service.  "I can't believe they give us food on the plane!  They are sooooo nice!"  She's not a true paying customer yet so her expectations are low.  :)

We didn’t have any room to spread out until our layover in Brussels, where I took the opportunity to lay down on the floor with the bags, and nap.  It felt so good to lay down!  It was 1am-4am our body time during the layover.  

Leave it to my kids though to still have energy and play the whole time at the little airport playground.  J  My kids did exactly the opposite of what I thought they would on this trip!  They were definitely running on adrenaline.  It’s hard to relax when you’re moving to Africa I guess.  J  Needless to say, for the last 8.5 hrs of flying on Brussels Air, we appreciated the few extra inches of leg room that United did not offer us.  And more attention from the flight attendants.