Day 1 of actual travel.

We thought it would never get here. Rise early, finish packing, weigh the bags to make sure we are legal. The girls are, I am pushing the limit, so we move stuff around and are now all legal. Drive to Kansas City airport, catch plane to Detroit, no trouble at all.

Detroit is a very nice airport, though a 7 hour stopover seems excessive. Not sure why we were not able to sit at home in Kansas City for a few of those hours. We could have been just as anxious there, but no, Detroit it was. At least we had gotten off the ground. A few pictures of the cool fountain in the Detroit airport, kind of like those at Disney. How do they get the water to stay neatly in place while it travels across the sky like that?

With that much time to spare, we were sitting ducks for impulse spending. I bought myself a 10 minute massage right there in the airport, in part a nod to Aaron, one of our other kids who is a massage therapist in Boulder, Colorado. About the time I was getting nice and relaxed, the fire alarm went off for the whole terminal. I was sitting face down (it was a chair massage) just off the large noisy hallway, but now the noise was inside, blaring, loud, I imagined the lights were also flashing, but I never looked up. My massage therapist didn’t flinch. “This happens all the time.” That didn’t exactly fill me with confidence, but I had already paid for it, so I was not about to break the spell. Later I talked Peggy into getting a massage too, Ginger wouldn’t bite.

In Detroit we ate at Chili’s, then got ice cream, then got chocolate. Hey, it was 7 hours.

Finally we were off to Paris. A few years ago we went to see Gabe in Paris at the end of his Study Abroad experience. That flight seemed like forever. This time we had to pace ourselves, as Paris was the short leg of the trip (not counting Detroit). Madagascar was 10 hours right after we landed in Paris. Fortunately, we had good advising from Brett, who travels a lot for his job these days. We invested in two sets of noise-canceling headphones, the ones that magically create sound waves that cancel out the sound coming toward them. The place they work best is in a situation where you have a constant sound, like the very loud noise that jet engines make. When you put the headphones on and turn them on, even without any music, they eliminate much of the racket. With music, it’s pretty miraculous. That made the very long trip a bit more tolerable. But only a bit.

We had 1 hour and 15 minutes in the Paris airport, and we had to change terminals. Folks who know CDG (Charles de Gaulle) winced when we said that, and we learned why. CDG is always under lots of construction, and getting from one terminal to another requires a bus ride. They run shuttles pretty regularly from one terminal to the next. After landing a few minutes ahead of schedule, we taxied for about 15 minutes, eating away at that 75 minute window we had to get to the other flight. As we came out of the terminal, the shuttle bus was getting ready to leave. We actually pushed past the guard who was telling the couple in front of us that we would all have to wait for the next shuttle (not yet in sight). She just shrugged as we bolted past her, carry-on in hand. The shuttle really WAS full, so we re-enacted a scene from a news story I had seen once of commuters in downtown Tokyo, where they apparently have somebody whose job is to actually shove commuters onto the crowded trains during rush hour. That was me. I used my carry-on to shove my wife and sister onto the anonymous crowd on that shuttle, and had to push extra hard to get my own butt inside the door so it would close.

Ginger misunderstood the time thing, and thought we had just 15 minutes to make our next flight (we actually had an hour and 15 minutes). She was yelling at the guard in English that we HAD to make that shuttle, as we only had 15 minute. The later re-telling of that story (by me) had her yelling to the guard, “WE’RE AMERICANS. We MUST be allowed on that bus!!!” She didn’t really say that, but we always got a good laugh out of the re-telling. Sometimes we needed a good laugh. In the end, we waited at the gate for over an hour after we were supposed to board. It was CDG after all.

The flight to Antananarivo (Tana) took 11 hours, the food was surprisingly good, lots of bread, wine, French food I think (we were on Air France). The plane was pretty crowded, though not completely full. You could watch the takeoff on the screen attached to the seat in front of you. I don’t recommend it. Actually I recommend you find a way to get unconscious for the first 10 hours or so. The takeoff thing made me nauseous, a harbinger of things to come. Lots of “Are we there yet” from all three of us. Amazed at how much garbage can be left behind on a plane that big in the air that long.

We arrived in Tana late on the second day of our trip. They are about 8-9 hours ahead of us, so we had been traveling about 36 hours, including layovers. We had to wade through customs, long lines, very tired people, not sure what we were supposed to put on the forms, but muddled through, and once through customs, we got to have our bags checked for anything we might be bringing in. They showed mercy on us and just passed us on through to the awaiting Gabe. What a sight for sore eyes. Lots of tired hugs, so good to see him after more than a year, with him on the other side of the world.

We met a couple of Gabe’s PCV friends in the airport, picking up their family for a similar trip, and we (Gabe) worked to negotiate a shared taxi into the city (about a 40-minute ride to our hotel). In the end, we got a ride in our own taxi, a driver who apparently worked for our hotel, or our travel agent or something. Anyway, it was an old white Toyota, pretty beat up I thought to myself. It was the best taxi we would ride in our whole trip.

Having landed late at night, the city was pretty quiet, nothing open at midnight. We drove past lots of poverty, as witnessed in the construction, the upkeep, lots of things. I thought maybe it was just that way close to the airport, but it was that way all the way into the heart of the city where our hotel was located. We came to a checkpoint, where the gendarmes pulled us over, checked the driver’s paperwork, checked our passports. AK-47s I think. First time I’ve seen one in person. Routine silliness says Gabe. I act non-plussed. I really am plussed.

We stayed at Saka Manga the first two nights. I think it means blue cat. Not a bad hotel, though the room Gabe and Ginger shared was quite a bit bigger than the one Peggy and I were in. Ours didn’t have ants though, and theirs did, in the towels. We have some pictures of construction going on outside our window, all by hand, with shovels and picks, no power tools.