Saying Goodbye and Coming Home

It has taken me a few days to get this post written. It has been a busy few days of traveling, getting home, adjusting to our new time zone and dealing with jet lag, seeing friends and family, and trying to figure out what it means to settle back into life here in Oregon. And I have also been trying to figure out what I wanted to say and how to say it about leaving Germany.

Saying goodbye was hard, much harder than I thought it would be given how excited I was to go back home to friends and family. We made a few good friends during our time in Germany and it was hard to say goodbye, not really knowing if we would ever get to see them again. And I enjoyed how simple our life was there. It was peaceful in a way that I hadn't experienced in a long time. We will need to figure out how to live that way back home.

I got a hug from Judith, the lady who runs the little store in Embken and we exchanged email addresses so that we could stay in touch. She was so great with Mikayla and made our little trip to her store, which was nearly every day, something we looked forward to. She was also one of the few people that could speak English, at least a little, in the town we were in, and I appreciated the effort she made to talk to me and make me feel welcome.

Saying goodbye to Mary, our landlady, was hard. She was such a big part of our life in Germany and a big reason why I enjoyed it so much. She was wonderful with Mikayla and was sad to see her go. She gave Mikayla a cute little bracelet to have and also a teddy bear backpack to have to remind her of her time in Germany. I am not sure I can put into words just how much it meant to me to have someone to talk to, to have someone who enjoyed my child, and to have someone I could ask all those stupid little questions you have when you are in a culture your own. Goodbye, Mary. We hope that we can see you again soon.

Mary, Mikayla, and I

On Friday, September 25, we left what had been our home for nearly three months and drove away from Embken for the last time. It was a beautiful morning with a low, misty fog hovering over the fields and promise of the sun breaking through the clouds. Mary had gotten up to wave goodbye to us and give us a hug, and also help with some of the last minute details of getting out of the apartment. And then we drove to Cologne so that we could turn in the rental car and get on our 8:50 am train to Frankfurt. We got there in just enough time to locate the rental car lot, haul our stuff into the train station, turn in the rental car, wait in line at the Lufthansa ticket counter and find out that we didn't really have our tickets booked after all, get hurriedly issued tickets for at least the train portion of our journey with instructions that we would need to figure out what was going on with our plane tickets once we got to Frankfurt, run up to the train platform, find our car, and then pile us and all our stuff on with the help of a few kindly strangers. And we were barely an hour and a half into our day of travel.

When we booked our plane tickets, we had gone with Lufthansa since they were the only ones that offered a direct flight from Portland to Frankfurt and we thought that would be the easiest, though not the cheapest, way to go with a toddler. Then we found out that they canceled their direct flight service to Portland in the beginning of September and had re-rerouted us. That was where the confusion with the tickets came in. For some reason they knew about us and knew that we were scheduled to be re-routed, but we didn't have actual tickets. So, once we got to the airport, we had to wait in several different lines before we found the one that would issue us a ticket, then had to wait in another, and one we had been in previously, to get the actual boarding pass. In fact, we talked to the same lady both times. It was nice that we had a long time between when the train got in and when our plane took off because we would have been pretty stressed out with how long it took to straighten everything out. Mikayla did pretty good with all the lines, so that made it easier, too.

And then we were ready to get on the plane. We got through Customs, Security, to the gate, and then onto the plane. We settled Mikayla in her seat, turned on cartoons on her seatback tv, gave her some milk, and then she was out. I was thinking that we couldn't have timed it any better than that, then settled in to wait for everyone else to finish boarding the plane. Once everyone was boarded and had been for awhile, the captain came online and said that they had found a dent in the cargo hold door, that although they had been flying with it that way for six months the deadline for fixing it was yesterday, and as a result the plane was not cleared to fly. So, about an hour after boarding, we found ourselves having to get back off the plane and on to buses that took us to a holding area to wait for another plane to come in and take us to Denver. And our perfect timing was out the window.

We did get on another plane, which took off about three hours after we were originally supposed to leave. The flight itself was okay, until Mikayla had a hard time falling asleep again and fell apart. It was hard to blame her with how long her day had been, and she didn't fall apart until after we should have been off the plane in Denver. She managed to fall asleep for a bit, but we were all exhausted by the time the plane landed.

She fell apart again in the line to get through Customs, but this time it ended up being a good thing, although it didn't feel like it at the time. While we were struggling to hold her while she was crying and keep moving with the line with all of our stuff, a Customs official came and got us and moved us to the front of the line. I think we skipped over at least a half hour wait in line. It ended up being a really good thing we did that, too, since we were the last ones on our flight to Portland as it was. If she hadn't fell apart in the line I think we would have missed that flight, too, and had to wait for a later one.

All we had was a little over two more hours on a plane, and then we were home. Luckily, we all were able to sleep for most of the flight. And then we were finally home. Darren's dad was there waiting for us, which was wonderful. When we finally got to our house, we figured that we had been traveling for 26 hours since we left our apartment in Embken that morning. It was good to be home, though we will always remember our time in Germany.