The Flight

I was petrified of the trip here, so much so that it prevented me from getting excited at all about moving here. The total travel time from door to door was ~ 31 hours and I was dreading it. I imagined Samara being awake for all 31 hours and them landing the plane in the middle of the ocean to kick us off. Samara actually travels well—this was her 10th flight, I believe. But she's not able to fall asleep even when we travel all day long. She hasn’t napped on a plane since she was probably 4 months old. Thankfully, the trip over went much better than expected…I guess when you plan for the worst you are pleasantly surprised.

We were also really worried about our luggage. Singapore Air had repeatedly told us over the phone (we called several times for clarification) that we weren’t allowed to go a pound over 50 (what ever happened to the 70lb limit?) or we’d have to pay $309 so we packed and weighed and repacked and reweighed, went to marriage counseling, and repacked and reweighed. They also said there was a carry-on luggage weight limit of 15 pounds. Our biggest concern was a suitcase we’d packed with our iMac, as it had clothes packed around it and we knew couldn’t take anything out (for risk of our dear computer not being padded) if it was at all over weight. When we checked in, Ben put that suitcase on the scale and it was 51 pounds, so he turned up the charm (I don’t mind him flirting when it gets us stuff like extra candy in our blizzards) and, as he was leaning forward on the counter, asked the attendant in his sexiest voice, “This bag is a pound over, is that going to be OK?” (batting eyelashes). She said, “Oh, we don’t care about a few extra pounds.” She didn’t even weigh the other bags. AH!!!!!!!!!!! She also didn’t charge us for the extra bag. It was a blessing and we’re grateful but had we known we could have fit in so much more stuff. We had plenty of room in our bags but were already at the limit. Our carryon luggage(way over the 15 pound weight limit) was still in the car so we couldn’t move stuff over from those but who weighs carry-ons?

Samara got sick a few days before we left and we had to wake her up a couple hours early the day of the flight so she was already going into the trip sleep deprived and was ready for a nap on the way to San Francisco. Ben almost got her to sleep in the airport there but then the attendant came over and weighed our carryons. We then had to rearrange and check in two of our carryons, which, thankfully they didn’t charge us for. Since Samara didn’t nap she was tired pretty early on in the flight, which was great because we thought then she’d sleep all the way to Korea. We got her to sleep and laid her in this bassinet thing that hooked to the wall in front of us. It was quite small but some sort of a bed. Unfortunately, we didn’t know that anytime the fasten seat belt light came on we’d have to take her out. An hour later it came on and the flight attendant frantically came over, unzipped it, and told us we had to hold her and buckle her to one of us. She, of course, woke up and the fasten seat belt light, of course, went off 10 minutes later. We then experienced the only really bad part of the flight, where she couldn’t fall back asleep for 4.5 hours and was pretty miserable for about 2 hours. The flight attendants were all very helpful and nice. They offered us at least 27 times another little stuffed Bloo and to take her to give us a break. After collecting a pile of these little Bloos, we asked them if the Bloo was laced with some kind sleep aid. They replied that the Bloos were and usually after 3-4 bloos even the toughest child is out cold. That’s our little girl--even the strongest sleeping meds don’t put her to sleep. We had asked when we booked our tickets and in SFO if we had to deboard the plane in Korea. We were always assured we didn’t as they were only refueling. After everyone deplaned and we were just hanging out, they told us we had to get off and reboard. Samara had stayed asleep up until we had to get off. We reboarded and each took turn sleeping a little bit until Samara fell asleep again for the last few hours of the flight.