Day 11 -- Travel Day Continues

We left Ethiopia a little late but managed to make it to Dubai with sufficient time to catch our connection. Little man had a pretty good meltdown but just one on this flight. We chalked it up to not wanting to leave his home-land. I can't say enough for the little bassinets they provide for you. We were in the middle of the plane (777-300) but had exit rows to either side of us. That made the leg room spacious and we still had the bassinet in front of us. This meant we could lay him down to sleep and not sweat it out as he's a pretty warm body.

The flight out of Dubai was hard. He had a breakdown as we were taxi-ing to take-off. He was just plain tired and acted like he was hungry so he just screamed and screamed and didn't want his bottle. He was very loud. The couple next to us had a one-year old and her loud comments often stirred Gutu from his slumber -- frustrating but I can't say Gutu necessarily help her much either at times. It was a very, very long flight (13 hrs., 45 minutes). When there was 4 hours left I felt like dying. Luckily Gutu chilled in his bassinet to give us some time to eat breakfast. He's just generally a good little traveler. He exceeded our expectations of him and we hope that continues for the next and last flight.

As I type this post we're in an airport lounge (highly recommend spending the $90 for the "trial offer" when you making international trips, especially with new child in hand) while we wait for our next flight. We arrived early and made it through immigration without a hitch other than the airport is very hot and muggy. I felt like I was choking on my own stench, let alone from others. Once we made it through, we checked with Delta to see about getting on an earlier flight (confirmed). You can't do that until three hours before the flight so we went to the lounge, had some snacks and took showers. Ahhh...much, much better. It was finally nice to have water pressure and the showers were very, very clean (JFK, Terminal 4, Oasis Lounge) and comes highly recommended after a long flight.

Once it was time, we made it back over to check on changing flights. Gutu wooed the lady at the check-in counter (not hard with his good looks) and she confirmed us on the earlier flight free of charge. We hope the flight doesn't run late; Talking to our kids this morning made us long even more to see them soon. Just one more flight and we'll finally be home.