Curse of the Travel Gods

To blog or not to blog--that is the question. I made a promise to myself that I would avoid blogging when I was bound to write something I would regret. I bit my tongue a lot in December. Therefore, I did not blog. I probably need to write something. So here I go. Also, blogger is doing some wonky things with my formatting. I apologize in advance if this is a mess.

Above is a picture of my dear brother-in-law Peter and his new wife, Kristen. She may be one of the best Christmas presents our extended family has ever received. We love this adventurous, artistic, native New Englander. Parry and I found good (read: reasonably priced) flights from Moscow enabling us to join the festivities in Boston and Newport, Rhode Island.

The adventure going to and from the wedding is another story. Our flight leaving Moscow on Thusday December 10 was delayed by 3.5 hours making our 4 hour layover in JFK irrelevant. We were sitting in baggage claim in customs/passport control watching the minutes tick by as our connecting flight to Boston departed. There was no Delta or Aeroflot representative to be found when we finally got out of customs. We found a nice JetBlue employee who helped us book the last flight of the day to Logan. Naturally that flight was delayed by almost an hour. We landed in Boston at 12:30AM after starting our airport day in Moscow at 12:30PM. By our calculations, with delays, layovers, and flight time, we were traveling for about 24+ hours. We did find our hotel in Lexington, next to Minuteman Historical Park, around 1:45AM. I vaguely recall going to bed and waking up but I can't be sure that I ever slept. Wedding was lovely. The sun shone brightly on a brisk winter day. Usual Jarman family shenanigans being late to the reception ensued (Jarmans have a tendency to be lax about schedules as opposed to my family, the Claytons, who are neurotic about schedules. I have learned to survive it with a good deal of yoga breathing and chocolate). Flowers were lovely. Food was excellent. No one broke any of the china at the New York Yacht club. Even cowboys from west of the Mississippi remember their table manners from time to time. Saturday was a marathon shopping day. We had lists of items to buy for ourselves and our expat neighbors ranging from a laptop computer from Costco for our German friends to multiple bags of shaved organic coconut from Whole Foods for another neighbor. Hubby wanted a suit from Filene's Basement. Suffice it to say, the hardest items to find were marshmellow fluff (yet another neighbor) and Pilsbury Pudding in the Mix yellow cake mix for a forthcoming epic cupcake baking fiesta I had to undertake on behalf of the Anglo-American School class of 2010. Day ended in Boston's Back Bay with exquisite Thai food and a shopping spree, on behalf of my daughters, to Sephora. With plans to visit Modern Pastry and Mike's Pastry for cannoli in the morning, my life attained new heights of bliss. Sunday was return to Moscow day. I should have known that we were in for a long day when we arrived at Logan, on-time of course, to discover that our connection to JFK was delayed by almost two hours due to a incoming storm. An earlier shuttle to LaGuardia had available seats, but we would have to take a taxi from LaGuardia to JFK and along with our four monster suitcases full of groceries. We decided to switch flights and hope traffic between LaGuardia and JFK was do-able. 90 minutes later, they canceled the LaGuardia flight. We bounced back to the JFK flight. Which was delayed again. Lo about 4PM, I was stuffing my face with Fudrucker's bacon cheeseburger and fries, visions of missed connections dancing through my head. The trick with international connections is that typically they close 60 minutes before flight time. We were connecting from Delta to Aeroflot and Aeroflot will not allow electronic check in for US/Russia flights nor will they allow Delta to check you in and assign seats. I have been told this is for immigration/visa reasons. In order to get a boarding pass, we had to physically present ourselves to the Aeroflot desk at JFK before the flight closed. When we were confronted with leaving Logan around 4:20PM, we knew we would have less than 30 minutes from when we touched down to get off the plane, change terminals and check-in. We made it with 5 minutes to spare. Surely, I thought, our bad luck streak had ended. Yes, we were seated in the back of the plane which meant once we landed at Sheremetevyo Airport (regularly listed as one of the worst airports in the world) we would be hard pressed to make it through passport control in under and hour, but hey, we'd be in Moscow, right? 3 hours after boarded our flight, we left JFK. Yes, we sat on the ground, watching the rain, wondering where we were (we had been sent to some obscure corner of the airport by a bunch of warehouses to wait for our turn to take off). We landed in Moscow around 2:15PM. The original scheduled time was 12PM. Sure enough, I was the last one through passport control. By 3:45PM, it became clear that our baggage had been lost. All of it. Including a suitcase that my mother had packed and sent with relatives containing most of our daughters' Christmas gifts. We filed the proper paperwork. Signed a bunch of blank forms (this is scary in Russia--you have no idea what you're signing) and were promised that our bags would arrive on the next flight. Aeroflot would kindly deliver them to our home. All would be well. Never believe a Russian bureaucrat who tells you all will be well. Meanwhile, we had to go straight to hubby's office because he had legal documents that had to be signed before the end of work day. The weather in Moscow, naturally, was dark and foul. When we arrived at Intel's office in Krylatsky, I found an empty cubicle, put my head down and fell asleep. I think we made it home around 7:30PM. Yet another 24 hour+ travel day. Long story short, we had issues with our baggage. It involved many trips to our property management office, asking them to call Aeroflot and find out the status of our luggage. After five days of waiting and calling, property management contacted Aeroflot (after calling three or four different phone numbers) and found out that Aeroflot would not deliver our bags for customs reasons; I would physically have to claim them at the airport. This is Russia's latest ploy to raise money--they are milking customs for everything they can get. People used to be able to get away with loading their bags when they went abroad--these days, not as much unless you are careful and know how to avoid being pulled over for inspection. We had an expat friend with a suitcase full of hams that got nailed this summer. If Russia wants to charge me for that extra bag of Ziploc sandwich bags and Life cereal, they are definitely scraping the bottom for revenue. Thankfully, my friend Elke had a car to take me to the airport. We visited the third world bowels of Sheremeteyvo. This room looked like the warehouse where the US government stored the Lost Ark in Indiana Jones. Hardly a computer in sight--everything was written on ledgers. We spent almost three hours filling out more forms and waiting for customs to decide whether we were being honest about what was in our bags before they finally released the bags to us. The cheese cannoli filling we had bought from Mike's was a bit on the grainy side, but everything else including the all important Trader Joe's Peppermint Jo-Jo's had survived. For good measure, it took almost 2.5 hours to drive the 30 or so kilometers home. At some point, I began to question what the universe might have against me and why everything I attempted during this time period (and continue to attempt--but that's another story) seemed to sour. I'm sure someday I will double over with laughter telling this story, but right now it gives me a headache to even think about. I sometimes wonder why some people are lucky and other people aren't. I don't know if my guardian angels have taken their coffee break over the last month or so, but it seems like I've been taking "one for the team" more often than not. I am painfully aware that my problems are petty in the grand scheme of things which is why I took a blogging hiatus: the last thing I want to do is whine to the world and make it sound like my problems are huge. They aren't. To me they might be big. To the universe at large? Not so much. Someday, when I have permission, I will share a sad story that happened over the holidays. Right now there are confidentiality issues that I have sworn to uphold. Suffice it to say, this story is the story I tell myself whenever I feel the self-pity show taking center stage. In the meantime, the next flight I'm taking is to Athens to see my sister Julie and her family. The weather should be lovely in Greece and there will be lots of feta, cucumber-tomato salad and kebab sandwiches on the Plaka to be enjoyed. As a public service, I'm letting the world at large know that we're flying on Aeroflot, direct to Athens on Saturday February 20 returning a week later. Anyone hoping for a stress-free travel experience probably should consider booking a flight other than the one I'm on....