Flying Home to Santa Cruz (July 8, 2013)

Flying Home to Santa Cruz / Leaving Ecuador

There will be many posts about our summer in Santa Cruz and they will be in semi-chronological order ... if I waited until it was perfect it would never get done! So here goes nothing ...

Here is Lily flying home in first class!!! Here are my three favorite things in the world, my wonderful wife Lauren, my baby girl Lily ... and my mimosas =)

Father and daughter leaving Lily's country for the last time (at least for a few decades)

Here is Lily playing with mom ... the flight attendant showed us this game

Here is Lily cleaning up after herself on the plane ride home

Woah, Lily looks funny after a nice sweaty nap on mom

Ahhh, layovers are nice and relaxing ... except ... (story below)

... except when you leave your entire life on the plane in Miami and get off the plane and start walking through some one-way-only checkpoints ... then realize you left an item ... and another ... and another ... AND ANOTHER ... this was our life, stuck in the no-mans-land (is it even U.S. soil?) between checkpoints. We had some of our bags (we had to go through customs) and a baby and a skycap who was toting our life for us (6 huge bags + carry ons). First we realized we left dad's guitar in the captain's closet and waited and waited while someone went across the entire airport to get it ... then LUCKILY they accidentally left a post-it on our guitar that said "camera" and "kindle" and we said, "shit! we forgot those too!" and had to call and have that same guy go all the way across the airport and come all the way back ... and for once we were very excited to have a 4-6 hour layover ...

Oh you thought the story was over? Little did you know that this trip home from Ecuador was only a few days after the airliner crashed at SFO and we were flying into SFO ... so we get to our gate - wrong, it's been changed ... to the COMPLETE other side of the airport ... lug our lives back upstairs onto the tram and across the entire airport ... gate change and delay ... lug the lives upstairs and onto the tram and to the otherside of the airport ... gate change and delay ... repeat ... repeat ... FIVE TIMES ... until two and a half hours after scheduled and 5 gate changes (all literally across the airport from one another - basically from one gate to the other and back to the first gate and back to the other and so on) ... we were on a plane home ... with all of our belongings!!!!!!!!

and as a reward ... here is Lily being as happy as possible and as cute as a button after just waking up in Santa Cruz (they day before her first birthday!)