There is no flowery, concise, or even organized way to describe the craziness that went down before I finally got onto the plane. The best I can do is split up what happened into semi-organized chunks.
Packing problems
While I had been packing things into my suitcase an entire week before departure, I found myself having a minor freak-out an hour before I had to leave for the airport. You see, until that moment, I hadn’t weighed my suitcase even once, and the initial weigh-in came out to 67 pounds, a whopping 17 more than I was allowed.
After debating then rejecting the possibility of taking a second suitcase, I gave up trying to take things out of my bag and settled for having a slightly overweight suitcase (I wonder if this is why my suitcase was randomly selected for inspection?) and a morbidly obese carry-on. Carry-ons don’t have a weight limit, and I haphazardly shoved anything that wouldn’t fit into my suitcase into my carry-on. Thank god it had wheels!
Goodbye fails
I am squarely placing the blame for this on NATO. Thank you NATO for not letting me properly say goodbye to my family. If it weren’t for your presence in Chicago, I wouldn’t have had to rush my goodbyes to get into the monstrously long, extremely thorough, and unbelievably slow security line.
On second thought, that might not have been all bad. The good? It didn’t give my parents a chance to get weepy.
Flying woes
As much I enjoy traveling, I really don’t like the packing and the flying side of it. Between 6pm on Friday when I left O’Hare and 1pm on Saturday (9pm Kenya time) when I arrived at Jomo Kenyatta, I slept only three hours. It is near impossible to sleep, read, or even watch too much tv on an airplane. I spent the majority of my time disturbing the passenger next to me as I struggled and failed to find a comfortable position. Sorry, sir!
Despite all this trouble (some of which was my own doing), I did make it to Kenya in one piece! An exhausted and frustrated piece, but a single piece nonetheless.
so proud of you and this journey you are taking! we will be following you:)