Ethiopia Trip- Travel Day

We left for Ethiopia on December 26th, right after all the Christmas activities. Our flight was planned to leave at 10:47am on the 26th...but there was snow in Chicago therefore there were delays! I, of course, almost threw up at the news that our flight had been delayed (we had several connecting flights before getting to Ethiopia). I must have went to the ticket counter about 6 times (and they were suprisingly nice every time!). I eventually got us to change our flights to go through Charolette instead of Chicago. I then thought to text our friends, Meredith and Curtis, who were supposed to have a later flight that day to see if they had to go through Chicago. Well they were supposed to and they looked and their flight was cancelled. Long story short they actually ended up on all of our flights going to Ethiopia :) Although it was stressful it was nice to get to travel with friends. We got to Washington DC around 7:20pm and our Ethiopian Air flight was to leave at 8:30pm. What we didn't know was they close their ticket counter at 7:30pm. We made it as they were closing down but they let us check in anyways. We then had to basically run to our gate to make the flight. Talk about stress. CRAZY! But with lots of prayer we made the flight.

In this last picture I think you can see the exhaustion and stress in my face. Yuck. Haha. The flight was LONNNNNG. No one should ever have to sit in a seat that long. Ever. I hung out in the back of the plane most of the time talking with Ethiopian men that were hanging out back there and the flight attendants. I just couldnt sit any longer. We stopped in Rome to get fuel for about an hour. Then we were off again. We made it to Ethiopia at about 10:15pm Ethiopian time. We had to get our luggage, which was a lot of luggage (Hey, can you blame me? I was a first time mom in a foreign country!). We had to get our visas, exchange some money, and go through customs. We then met up with our driver, Elias, he was holding a sign with our name on it. We were sick of carrying our luggage at this point. Lana and Larry were also waiting with our driver since they were also staying at the Grace Guest House and they also used Celebrate Children International. It was dark during our drive so we could not see much of the country at that time. We quickly learned that there are not a lot of traffic lights, stop signs, or street signs. Once we got to our guest house that took us up stairs for a Ethiopian meal. Brain and I are not big fans of Ethiopian food but we did eat it (ALL WEEK!). We were soooo tired at this point. After dinner we had a traditional Ethiopian coffee ceremony. Brian and I both hate coffee (even American coffee!). It was really funny to watch Brian drink it because he cannot hide his feelings about coffee. There was also popcorn with the coffee, which we did like! After the ceremony we tried to somewhat unpack our bags a little and organize our luggage. Even being exhausted it was a little hard to sleep knowing we were going to be meeting our baby boy the next day.