On Their Way Home

2011-05-19Uncategorized Standard

Finnur and Anna departed California today, and started their long journey back to Iceland.  They should arrive very early tomorrow morning.  The last few days in California have apparently been hectic, filled with lots of fun meet-ups with old friends.  It sounds a lot like when we used to travel to Iceland, except that Finnur’s been working the whole time they’ve been out there.  So it’s been busy, and I expect they’ll need some time to recover.

I think Finnur has been taking some photos with his phone, but not a lot have come my way.  Here are the few that I’ve gotten:

The new playground at Anna's old school. It's funny how it evolved from 'all natural materials' to 'very standard playground' because of budget constraints and safety standards. But it looks good! 🙂

One exhausted Anna. Hardly a day has gone by for two weeks where she hasn't had a playdate with an old friend! At almost all other times she's been with Sarah.

The Heap of Stuff. It took a while, but in the end it all got packed. And yes, they're bringing back trashbags from CostCo. They're just so good! 🙂

The very last meet-up was a breakfast this morning with Ivan and Margo Linscott at our old neighborhood coffee-house. #sigh# It sure would have been nice to be there!

Anna in the Seattle airport an hour ago or so. She had decided to use her blanket to use as a polar-bear wrap (the polar-bear-doll is in there somewhere!).

Somewhat disturbingly I got a phone-call from Icelandair some 20 minutes before the plane was supposed to depart from Seattle to Iceland.  The lady on the phone asked if I was traveling with Icelandair today, and I said no, my husband is.  She then asked “Is he on the plane?”.  I whaaaaaat-ed and quickly got a hold of Finnur via IM/phone telling him that he should be boarding.  I also gave the lady his US cell phone number, and I’m assuming that she called him.  All I know is that they ‘made it on board’ and that it was ‘a long story’ according to quick IM messages Finnur managed to send before he had to turn the phone off.  So, they’re on the plane, and should be landing in about six hours.  I better go to bed!

COMMENTS

Finnur

Yes, we almost missed our flight to Iceland.

Combination of things:
– I misread the boarding time so I thought I had more time.
– It took forever to pay at the restaurant I was eating at.
– It took a while to get Anna out of the play room (Gaaa!!) I had permitted her to go play in while I finished my food.
– We were running as fast as we could with our carry-on luggage to catch the plane but Anna (who had decided to not “fully wear” her sneakers but instead treat them like slippers) kept loosing a shoe and falling behind. GAAA!!
– And then we had trains to catch to get to the right terminal. Madness! 🙂

Thankfully I had an Android phone with a working data plan, so I could relay to them through Hrefna in Iceland what number I could be reached at so they could check on my progress (my number wasn’t known at the time we bought the tickets). They called twice, the second time to tells us they were sending a person to meet us at the escalators in their terminal so that we wouldn’t lose time trying to find the right gate.

“How will I recognize the person?”, I asked on the mobile phone.
“Don’t worry, they’ll recognize you”.
“Wait? What?”
“You’ll be the ones running up the escalators. Don’t worry, we’ll spot you right away.”

And, indeed they did. We were the last people on board and they pretty much closed the airplane 2 minutes after we boarded and took off. I tried to gauge the annoyance level of the people on the plane as we walked down the isle, but we only caused a five minute delay and it didn’t seem like the people on the plane noticed anything was wrong. Either that or everyone was relieved not to have to wait for the crew to unload all the bags from the plane to get ours off.