I think it's safe to say that aside from our journey to Prague, yesterday was the longest 24 hours of traveling of our lives. We started our day bright and early, loaded up the vans at 8 am Prague time (2 am North Carolina time) and headed to the airport. We made it through ticketing and baggage check in, miraculously with out any problems. I still don't know how my bag was under the 50 pound limit, but I was thrilled! Our first flight took off at 10:00 and was super quick, easy and right on schedule. We made it to Germany, had a short scheduled layover and off we went. The 8 hour flight to Newark seemed like it lasted forever! Thank goodness there were personal tv screens on the headrests in front of our seats! Those of us that couldn't sleep watched four movies and some tv episodes!
When we finally made our decent into Newark we we're thrilled! We were back in America at last! Land of the free refills and bathrooms, and the home of ranch dressing and English speaking people! We fist pumped over the Jersey shore and stared in awe at the Statue of Liberty as we made our landing. Everyone clapped, cheered and high fived we the flight attended came on the intercom and said "Ladies and gentlemen, we've arrived in Newark, NJ".
We made it through customs, claimed our bags and rechecked them, and went through security one last time, and hopped on a bus that took us to our gate. Once we arrived in our waiting area we took off to find the closest restaurant with free refills! I don't think we'd ever been so happy to sit down and have an American meal!
Once we we're full and re-hydrated we made our way back to the waiting area where we still had two hours to kill, so we thought. We were scheduled to board our flight to Raleigh at 7:50, but as our luck would have it, we we're delayed yet again. Time drug by, and soon we noticed that no flights were leaving the airport. We were not exactly happy that this was happening to us again. Brickhouse took off to find some answers, and when she returned, it wasn't good news! Our flight time had been pushed back till 10:50pm. We didn't even know what to do with ourselves so most of us played cards or slept on the floor of the airport.
10:30pm rolled around and we still hadn't heard an announcement that we were preparing to board. We patiently waited, and waited, and waited, until finally they told us that once again our flight had been moved back and our new departure time was 11:30pm. At this point all we wanted to do was get home, we're were tempted to just start walking, at this rate we'd be home on foot before the plane would ever leave! 11:30pm came and went and still no plane. We didn't make it on an airplane until 12:45am! Needless to say, we were grumpy, hungry, and fed up with airports!
Finally we made it to Raleigh, landing about 2:30am. We sprinted off the plane and into the airport where we couldn't wait to see our families! 2:35am was the happiest part of our day! We we're finally all reunited with family, had our bags and we're on the home stretch! I think it's safe to say that we're all going to avoid airports for a while!
