Can you say HALLELUJAH?!

We just finished the first LEG of our journey (hence the silly photo).

Let’s just say the day could have started a little smoother than it did, but we are shouting HALLELUJAH nonetheless.

We spent the night with Grammy J in Mountlake Terrace – up at 6am, off by 7am to get to our apartment building in Seattle by 8:00. We scheduled a limo ride to the airport (knowing a cab could never fit all our luggage). When the limo showed up, he didn’t even TRY to get our luggage in his car, he just said, “no way” and drove off! Here we were – the height of rush traffic, with no one to call and no backup plans on how to get down to the airport within an hour. Panic nearly set in at that point.

I called a few friends in Seattle only to be greeted by answering machines. We found a phone book and called a few taxi companies but when they answered with the “automatic greeting system” (aka VOICE JAIL), I hung up as I have no time for pressing option buttons when I’m trying to get to the airport ASAP. So then my brain scanned other options and landed on the one where we bother one of our tenants to take us in our van down the airport. We actually woke up Otto and Sarah to explain our dilemma and they came to our rescue! (Otto has lived in our building for over 20 years and all I can say is “we know how to pick ‘em”). So Kory drove us down in our van and Sarah returned the vehicle to the garage at our apartment building and there our van will sit for a year or so until we return (as planned). I told Sarah she was our savior, but Kaleb piped up and said that only JESUS is our savior. I stand corrected, but she was at least an angel.

When we got to the airport we were told that US Airways had a delayed plane coming into Seattle so our flight out was delayed and we’d miss our connection to London. We only thought we were stressed at that point dealing with the taxi and all… but more stress was yet to come.

I pride myself on getting the best fares possible when it comes to our many travels over the years. I’ve discovered that SAS gives deep discounts to Norwegian residents but you have to have a Norwegian bank account to pull it off. I’m not sure if they are just ripping off Americans when they fly SAS or if they are subsidizing Norwegian citizens. (We have a Norwegian bank account so there’s no problem with getting the discount.) I booked our flight from London to Aalesund, Norway separately as I paid for the trip to London with dollars, and the trip to Aalesund with Norwegian kroner. I now know this has a potential for disaster so I don’t recommend this money saving tip to anyone – ever – and I promise myself not to do it again. (But I will say that I saved over $1,500 in doing it this way).

So what happened was that USAirways said they couldn’t get us to London to catch our flight to Aalesund until the next day. I booked the connections 12 hours apart but that didn’t help in this case. They had many people who were going to miss the same connection and they were fresh out of options for us as “all flights are full” to London (even on other airlines). They said they would get us to Copenhagen but then we were on our own. I called SAS and the tickets to Aalesund from Copenhagen were $1,500 so there would have gone my savings… except that I had to eat the $250 I paid for the tickets from London to Aalesund, which I was willing to do at that point…. So when we went back to the counter to book the tickets to Copenhagen, the supervisor nixed that idea because she said she is only obligated to get us to London, which they could do tomorrow. Big problem. I called SAS again to find out how much it would be to change our tickets to the next day and when they told me it would be over $1,000 PER person (3k total), I nearly cried. And all US Airways could say is “you shouldn’t have booked your tickets separately – we are only obligated to get you to London…” so there is the fatal flaw in my plans.
I am fairly confident that Satan does NOT want us to go to Norway at this point – which can only be interpreted as a good thing. So, we prayed. I told God I’m not asking him to part the sea, just find a way for us to fly over it. It’s all his money anyway if and he wants to spend it so frivolously then that’s his business. I know Satan comes to lie, steal and destroy (according to the Bible) … and I really didn’t want to feel like I was being ripped off to the tune of $3,000 just to get from London to Aalesund so we left it in God’s hands and we shouted HALLELUJAH!

After nearly three hours of all this monkey-business, the USAirways guy told us that he finally found a flight for us to Los Angeles and then we can go British Airways to London and we’ll get in 2.5 hours later than our original flight. The only hitch is we were flying in and out of Gatwick airport and now we are flying into Heathrow and out of Gatwick so we need to schlep our luggage from one side of London to the other and forego our planned day at the science museum. Kaleb is a bit upset by that but I taught him the Serenity Prayer and he’s been saying it over and over “God grant me the ability to change the things I can, to accept the things I can’t, and the wisdom to know the difference.”

We are now at the LA Airport awaiting our non-stop flight to London. We figure God doesn’t take away anything he doesn’t give us something better so my next post will be the blessings we’ve encountered along the way. HALLELUJAH! (So far this whole ordeal has saved us $25 as USAirways was going to charge $50 for our extra piece of luggage and Alaska Airlines only charged us $25.)