Eliot's Travels

Chicago

We arrived in Chicago 12+ hours after boarding the plane at Schiphol. We were on the same flight number to Denver but had to go through the hoops to get back to the domestic flight terminal. We had missed our flight to Denver because of the delays, but that was a secondary concern to getting through the immigration and customs maze. I waited for our stroller until almost everyone was off the plane and until the flight attendant told me that gate-checked strollers would be in the baggage claim area after immigration.

Basically, we had to walk that whole way to get to our stroller, which is how we managed to carry everything and the two boys up to this point. We had 2 huge carseats, 2 roller bags, a backpack, 2 kid backpacks, another canvas bag, my bag/purse and 2 little boys who had already been traveling for 17 hours. This is definitely the time that mom wondered what she was thinking when she volunteered to help us move back. I wanted to die or at the very least just sit down in the hallway and stop for good in Chicago's international terminal. There was no way to carry either boy (the Ergo was in our luggage), so they had to walk. It was not pretty at all.

After walking nearly 0.25 miles, a nice gentleman came up and took our two carseats. After a bit of walking and listening to Miles say "carry me, momma" for the fiftieth time, his wife gave me her roller bags and she carried Miles. Going down our second set of escalators we came to airline cart. By this time we had probably walked 1/2 mile. The man and his wife helped us onto the cart and the driver took us the next 1/2 mile to the immigration lines. The driver told us to wait a minute in the cart, so we did. He came out of customs wheeling 2 luggage carts for us to put our carryons and carseats onto, plus there was a seat for the boys. Oh my gosh - he saved our lives. I have no idea how we would have even made it through the immigration line dragging our things. I really was ready to call Jim and tell him to drive to Chicago to pick us up (only 1000+ miles from Denver). I wanted to go no further for a long time.

Past immigration, we picked up our luggage and a purser to help wheel our 3 carts of stuff through customs and into the rebooking line. The United area was chaos, as there was no definitive line and lots of people had missed their flight. This was the eve of the Valentine's Day storm out east. After 1 hour in the rebooking line, we were checked through to Denver. Luckily, our agent was nice and checked our carseats as baggage. I don't think we would have made it if they hadn't.

The only food we had was the lunch 12 hours earlier, and a light snack right before landing. We were all starving - well I still wasn't feeling up to eating. Now, we had the long haul to the domestic terminals: up and down elevators, to the train, up and down more escalators, through security (the TSA is totally rude), and down to our terminal. I grabbed a bagel for the boys for dinner and we arrived at our gate as the plane was boarding. Though it was supposed to be full, the flight was pretty empty because of the weather out east. The boys fell asleep as soon as they ate their bagels and cream cheese. Welcome to America, boys.

posted by Whitney @ 2:30 PM