enRoute to NY
The first day of our trip was uneventful to say the least. First we had to get up really early in the morning to catch our 8:30 a.m. flight. Our good friend, Aaron, drove us to the airport that morning. We got to the airport as planned, no snag there, but since we have a paper ticket (we bought our tickets from a travel agent) we have to go through a special line. This line would have been great if the lady wasn’t so slow and that there were two other people in front of us. You think that’s not many but this lady spent a good 15 minutes with each one! After asking around, I finally got somebody to work on our boarding passes. Less than 5 minutes! And that got us all the way to Jakarta. Bags and all.
You think that was the only snag. Well, our flight was delayed and since we only have a 45 minutes layover in Washington D.C. we missed our flight. The good news was that we don’t need to be in N.Y. until at least 7 p.m. and this was still noonish. The bad news was that many of the flights were booked. United finally found us a flight but it was out of the other airport in D.C., the smaller one, National I think. So, the airline got us a cab and off we went. The taxi ride was nice. The driver was French descent so we got to talking about France, food, and D.C. The airport wait wasn’t so bad either. Thank goodness for our portable car seat. I had the car seat vest in my carry-on and when we needed it for the taxi ride, we just had to whip it out. No need to lug big bulky car seats!
When we got to N.Y. we were in La Guardia and we needed to get to JFK. Since our initial flight was suppose to land in JFK, United also prepared ground transportation for us. The trick was, you can to ask for it when you get to La Guardia. So, after we landed, we had to go back up to departure and find somebody to dig up the notes in our flight record. They ended up giving us cash for taxi and we just hopped on one. United didn’t give us enough, not by much, but still, not too happy since it wasn’t our fault we missed our connection and then we had to go through all that hassle AND pay some money out of pocket for the cab. By the time we got to N.Y., it was close to six, so not a long wait for our 8:30 p.m. boarding for Singapore airline.
We were though very relieved and tired by the time we got to N.Y. and we haven’t even left the country. From N.Y. we had a 21 hour flight to Singapore (with an hour layover in Frankfurt) and then another hour and a half flight to Indonesia.