Tuesday, September 4

My oh my, what a day. Gene and I woke up yesterday morning facing a never-ending to-do list. We were still organizing our household after moving a few days prior, and now we had to run last-minute errands and pack for our trip. The day wore into evening, the evening rolled into nighttime, and still we hadn’t come to the end of our list. At 3 a.m. we decided that whatever tasks hadn’t been completed by then wouldn’t be completed, so we piled our suitcases into the car and headed for the airport.

The early hour meant no crowds so we easily passed through security and found a seat in the waiting area. We’d already been awake for 25 hours when our flight left at 8:20. The flight took us to Toronto, another took us to Vienna, and the last leg took us to Kosice, Slovakia.

Overseas travel sounds glamorous, but glamorous it is not. Imagine the screaming toddler behind us from Toronto to Vienna – three hours of non-stop crying until she fell asleep exhausted. Imagine reaching Vienna after being awake for about 40 hours and then searching for a place to rest during our four-hour layover. We found one waiting area with about 150 other people who looked equally exhausted. I crashed on a bench while Gene guarded our belongings. Then we switched places and he caught a short nap. At this point we felt like total aliens – we couldn’t read a word on the signs, couldn’t understand a word of anything spoken, and had no local currency to buy a snack. We’d entered another part of the world in which nothing was familiar.