Washington nach Wien, Part 2

Continued...

Soon, we were airborn.  And soon, Matilda was asleep.  Turns out that when you put a baby in their car seat at bedtime and put them on a white-noise, slightly vibrating plane, it knocks them out.

  That was a dozen sorts of awesome, because it left two of us to deal with Phoebe.  All things said and done, she did a great job (the Lufthansa entertainment system also gets props, for containing "The Garuffelo, which was watched about 87 times).  Unfortunately, white noise or not, there was no way Phoebe was going to sleep during dinner service, wine service (gotta love European airlines), and duty-free service.  Finally, 3+ hours into a flight that was less than 7 hours, they finally dimmed the lights.  Dan fell asleep, and then I did, and as I was nodding off I noticed Phoebe still peering around like a curious meerkat.  Thankfully, by the time Matilda woke me up two hours later, she was deeply and totally out.

I'm very thankful the plane was only about half full, for two main reasons:  One, I could ask for an extra breakfast, since it suddenly kicked in I hadn't eaten a lot in the last 24 hours.  Secondly, if there had been someone sitting in front of Phoebe, I probably would have gone bankrupt buying them drinks as she kicked....kicked...kicked the back of the seat the whole time.

For those of you in the Foreign Service, you probably know Frankfurt Airport well.  Very well.  Almost biblically so.  I've heard the joke that even God transfers Frankfurt to get to heaven. It's a big, busy airport, and Lufthansa goes to a LOT of places, some of them quite obscure.  So I've been there before, and I've had some marathons to try and catch a change of plane.  Plus, this time, we were entering the Schengen Zone, which meant we had to go through passport control and security.  Honestly, with all the baggage pictured in the last post, why Dan and I agreed to take the flight with connections is a matter for our defense lawyers in the criminal insanity plea.  But we did, and somehow manage to finagle the two cats into one seat on the stroller.  I had a baby on my front and a backpack on my back, and Dan had two carseats around his shoulder and another backpack.  The diaper bag and briefcase were shoved under the stroller, where a tired and bewildered Phoebe sat.  Yes, truly, we did it.  Many thanks to the kind women at security, who were in a totally different class than the TSA morons.

At the Austrian check-in desk, we offloaded the car seats and double stroller through to Vienna, and had a really nice short flight, with Matilda on our laps and Phoebe looking out the window.  We arrived, found our sponsor, didn't find the double stroller, wrote up a thing at Austrian, got the kids cleaned up a bit, and finally made it to our temporary housing out in the 'burbs.  I think it ended up being a bit under 16 hours, door to door.

God bless the iPad.

The worst part of the whole thing?  There was no alcohol waiting in the house when we got there.  THE HORROR, PEOPLE.