…but thirty-six hours of cramped airplane rides and long layovers?\u00a0 Really?\u00a0 People, are we ANY closer to figuring out how to beam ourselves somewhere??\u00a0 This cross-Atlantic travel is getting old, especially when traveling with an active four year old and a bad back.<\/p>\n
One and a half hours from Boston to JFK.\u00a0 Six hours layover.\u00a0 Five hours to Vancouver to refuel.\u00a0 Fifteen more hours to Hong Kong.\u00a0 Another four hours layover.\u00a0 Four and a half hours to Bali.\u00a0 One hour car ride to our Bali home.<\/p>\n
Cathay Pacific.\u00a0 The disparity between first class and coach is astounding.\u00a0 The thing is, you walk through first class and you’re excited because it’s so exquisite.\u00a0 Then business class and you think you can actually do the long flight.\u00a0 You see the really cool headsets on the chairs of the premium economy class and you swoon.\u00a0 Then you get to your seats.\u00a0 The real<\/em> coach seats.\u00a0 Seats with, no lie, three inches of leg room in front of you, so when the person in front of you reclines, the back of his seat is in your mouth.\u00a0 C’mon.\u00a0 Cheap headsets that barely work.\u00a0 Food that is barely edible.\u00a0 Twenty hours of saying to each other, “If we can get through this we can get through anything.”<\/p>\n We survived by letting the kid watch movies through the night.\u00a0 And I took heavy drugs.<\/p>\n Finally, in Bali, we were met at the airport by Agung, our host and driver for the month.\u00a0 He drove us an hour from Denpasar to our bungalow in the rice fields, on the edge of the traditional Balinese town of Pejeng (just a two miles outside of Ubud, Bali’s hopping artisan town in the rice fields).\u00a0 Our daughter finally crashed in the car ride, and when we arrived at what would be our home for the next month, she awoke and unleashed everything that she held in the previous 36 hours (she was an angel on the plane, bless her soul).\u00a0 Agung’s family met our screaming child at the same time that we realized that one of our bags was missing.\u00a0 Agung and Megan turned right around for another hour drive back to the airport to hopefully retrieve the luggage while I struggled to settle our child in an unfamiliar place.\u00a0 The last straw was when I asked Kai to try one bite of the Indonesian noodles prepared for us.\u00a0 She bravely did as asked and then proceeded to vomit all over the table.<\/p>\n Needless to say, we weren’t able to take in anything that night.\u00a0 Not the welcome tropical drinks that Agung’s wife had waiting for us.\u00a0 Not the fabulous satay and nasi goreng meal.\u00a0 Not our new home.\u00a0 Not our surroundings.\u00a0 When Megan finally got home (with bag, thankfully), we vented, holding back tears, about our respective challenges and then crashed HARD.<\/p>\n What a journey.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" …but thirty-six hours of cramped airplane rides and long layovers?\u00a0 Really?\u00a0 People, are we ANY closer to figuring out how to beam ourselves somewhere??\u00a0 This cross-Atlantic travel is getting old, especially when traveling with an active four year old and … Continue reading