The Adventure Begins

Hey look! We made it!

Hello from Tirana, the beautiful capital city of Albania! This is a picture of us from earlier today, trying to capture the epic mountainous landscape behind us. I'll come back to that soon enough, but first let's rewind to Tuesday morning, which is when the journey began in earnest. 

I'm actually first going to clarify something that I clearly explained poorly in my last post: this trip is just the five of us (me, Clark, and the three kids), visiting my sister Faye and her partner Derrick. However, it was made possible by Faye, who hatched the plan, and then pooled her various air travel points with my mom's points and my sister Andrea's points, and managed to buy all five of our plane tickets. Such an incredibly generous gift from all three of them - but neither mom nor Andrea are tagging along. 

So, on Tuesday morning, we got dropped off at the airport by our kind friend Dag, managed to check the gargantuan duffel bag full of stuff for Faye, and made it through security with loads of time to spare.  Already this was a completely novel experience for all three kids, who have either never flown (Linden and Hazel), or were far too young to remember it (Juniper). 

This is from a trip to Corsica in 2010 - the last time Juniper was on a plane 

Our first flight was direct Halifax to London (Heathrow) - just over 6 hours of flying.  We each had our allotted 2 pieces of carry-on, having packed light and planned specifically to not check anything other than the bag of stuff for Faye.  Thanks to Hazel being only 4, we managed to be part of the coveted pre-boarders, and stowed all of our luggage without any problems. 

Linden and Clark, seated in the second-to-last row of the entire plane

Me and the girls, a row up from them

I must say, the kids all rocked that first flight.  It was a nice Air Canada long-haul plane, which meant we had personal screens with endless choices of movies and shows to watch, a meal and snacks provided, and lots of our own treats and entertainment as well.  Other than a slight delay before take-off and a rather alarming amount of turbulence on descent (which, as a side note, didn't even rattle any of the kids), I'd say the whole thing went off without a hitch. 

After disembarking at Heathrow, however, things started to go a little bit sideways.  To begin with, the way the tickets were booked, our Heathrow layover was going to be 9 hours.  Not ideal, I reasoned, but manageable. What hadn't occurred to me at the beginning, however, was that with the time change, those 9 hours would be an overnight layover. I started researching, and thought it might be worth the money to try and book a hotel room to have a place to just rest and hopefully catch a bit of sleep before our 6am flight to Vienna the next morning.  This was... not easy. Everything I found online was either prohibitively expensive, too far from the airport to make it a reasonable option, and/or showed no availability when I revealed that there would be 5 people. So it became a matter of figuring out what to do when we landed.

Long story short: there were, as it turned out, no good options. We spent the first three hours on an epic walking tour of the endless maze of terminals (and that was just between terminals 2 and 3!), hand carrying all 6 pieces of  our carry-on luggage, and being given a whole host of conflicting and useless information by the various night staff we encountered. For instance: when we finally made it from where we disembarked the plane to the entrance of terminal 2 (where we'd be catching our flight in the morning), we were told we could not enter until 2 hours before the flight at the earliest.  Our only option, we were assured,  was to go wait in terminal 3. 

So, we found the place to catch the inter-terminal bus, waited for long enough that we started to worry the bus wasn't going to come, then finally hopped aboard and  made our way to terminal 3. Once there, we rather inexplicably had to go through security, thereby dumping all the water we had, reorganizing our liquids, hauling out our electronics, and all the other things we had naively thought we would not need to do again. We then followed a few other hapless individuals who were clearly on a similar quest, until we reached... a set of locked doors. There we all waited, until someone found someone, who found someone else, who was able to unlock the doors.  Once this happened, however, we were all told that terminal 3 was shutting down for the night, and if we were going to wait there, we'd all have to crowd into the gate 7 waiting area for the evening.  Oh, and there would shortly be nowhere to find food or drink, and also, the first bus back to terminal 2 in the morning would not be running until 5am (which would likely mean we would miss our 6am flight). 

"Ummm... is this our only option?" I asked the man dispensing all of this information, trying to keep the quaver out of my voice. "Where are you from?" he asked in his jaunty British accent. When he found out we were Canadian, he said, "Oh, then you should just exit yourselves! Go through customs, and make your way back to terminal 2, where you can find a 24 hour cafe at the arrivals or the departure lounge, and just wait there until security opens in the morning". So. We walked (WALKED) all the way BACK to terminal 2, and "exited" ourselves. We were loose in London! Except, of course, we really couldn't go anywhere. It was now past midnight London time. We figured we would buy whatever looked edible from the 24 hour airport café,  then find some comfortable seating on which to wait out the rest of night. This was WAY too optimistic. Here is what we found:

Everyone valiantly trying sleep, sprawled in the area between the windows and the car rental booths

There's me, with an eye mask and the one travel blanket I'd brought.

Spoiler alert: no one slept.  Except maybe me, for an hour or so?  That's what Clark claims, though I'm skeptical, as it did not feel like I slept. To be fair, the odds were not in our favour. To begin with, we were... on the floor. There were literally no unoccupied chairs on which to park ourselves. Secondly, though we found this little hidden nook, we were soon joined by a rotating host of friends, one of which enjoyed switching between watching videos on his phone at full volume (with no headphones), and engaging in loud, clearly hilarious phone calls. Then there were the industrious nighttime airport repair crews, some of whom were tasked with continuous jackhammering (I kid you not), while others drove the airport trollies (always, it seemed, backing up with reversing beeps), and still others perched themselves from high places and dropped large, heavy objects to the floor.  At one point these were joined by the 3am window washing crew, washing our particular windows.  It was ALMOST funny. By the time they opened security at 4:15am, the departures lounge was insane.  People everywhere. Mass mayhem. We joined the very loosely defined queue, however, and found our way through security and to our gate.

The bubblegum banana ninja, who did manage to get an hour and a half or so of sleep between Heathrow and Vienna

Once at the gate to our Vienna flight, Clark went right up to the desk to make sure that the seats we had chosen were actually the ones we ended up with, as there had been a weird glitch in the system, which had put us all in random spots back when we had checked in at home.  The friendly check-in guy assured Clark it was all as it should be, and then said, "Are you travelling with a child under 5? If so, you might as well just come on up and board now."  Great! We gathered our stuff and up we went. 

 By then, however, another woman had appeared at the counter. "Stop! Pre-boarding is only for children 2 and under, and we have not announced that.  Go back and SIT DOWN."  The nice guy overheard, and intervened, ushering us through.  But at that point, however, the she-demon had it in for us. 

"Your children's passports are not signed.  They are therefore not valid, and you cannot get on the plane until they sign them."

 "That's actually not true in Canada," Clark began, and the woman loudly interjected ,

"Sir, I do this every day. They must be signed." 

"But the actual customs agent we just went through..."

"You will not get on the plane."

So. We had to get Linden and Juniper to sign their passports (which Linden initially, of course, signed in the wrong place), and Clark had to sign for Hazel, which we had specifically told NOT to do when we applied for the passports.  Hopefully this did not invalidate any of them.

THEN, she looked at our luggage and said, "You have too much. You cannot take two pieces each on the plane.  You will need to check some"

"No, our boarding passes specifically say..." 

"You cannot take the rolling suitcases on board.  They must be checked."

"But we have a very quick turnaround, and..."

She was already printing out our checked luggage tags.  Then she looked at me, and said "Madam, your suitcase is also too large".

"No, I already took it on..."

On went the third luggage tag.

This was not an auspicious start to a day that was already kind of crap to begin with. In any event, we made it onto the flight, which was short and uneventful, and (as the picture above suggests), Juniper found at least a little bit of shut-eye.  We had a tiny little blip in the Vienna airport, then it was on to our final short flight to Tirana. At the very tail end of this final flight, Hazel, who had hitherto refused to sleep AT ALL just... conked.  I should have seen it coming - she was completely loopy on that that final flight. For instance, she yelled, "THREE, TWO, ONE, BLAST OFF" as the plane taxied down the run way, which is completely out of character for her, and more than a little hilarious.

Conked, with 10 minutes left until touch-down

She was out cold as we disembarked, took a bus from the plane to the airport, went through customs....

\

... and was still out cold as we waited for our luggage.

So, we landed, made it through customs, then waited. And waited, and waited and waited, and GUESS WHAT? None of our checked bags arrived.  Not the big duffel we had checked in Halifax, and not the three carry-ons that we had been forced to check at Heathrow. A very helpful lost luggage guy helped us fill out a lost luggage claim form, and finally, finally, we stepped outside to give Faye and Derrick (who had been waiting patiently for some time at this point) big hugs.  Off we went (via their car and a taxi), to their gorgeous, spacious apartment in the heart of the city.  Though we were all crazy fatigued at that point, out goal was to try and stay up until a reasonable bed time in this new time zone, so we went on a walk, watched a pretty amazing lightning storm, had some supper, and then very gratefully fell into bed.

On a walk through the gigantic, beautiful park that is a stone's throw from the apartment.

Juniper and a very pregnant Faye, taking a rest

Snuggling on the deck, back at the apartment

Clark caught this vertical bolt of lightning.  It was an impressive show!

The full rainbow afterwards

After the clouds cleared, the mountains reappeared.  What a view from their porch!

I am happy to report that once we got a chance to actually sleep, we SLEPT. For over 12 hours.  The next day, I got a hold of friends from Dartmouth, who, as we were both shocked to discover, would be in Tirana at the same time as us.  Their son, Kiyaan, was in Hazel's pre-primary class, and when I learned that they were originally from Albania, I had mentioned that we were travelling there this summer, and the rest is history! So, we chose a place to meet (as it turns out, another section of the huge, beautiful park we'd gone to the night before), and had a fun play/hangout.

Juniper took this cute selfie on a big swing at the park

My version

Kiyaan and Hazel making their way through the playground obstacles...

... and the teeter totter...

... and the climbing apparatus...

... and the extravagant treehouse

One of the captive animals (including peacocks, guinea hens, rabbits, a rooster...) that were in a strange little section of the park. Apparently there used to be a BEAR until recently. We saw the little enclosure he used to be in as well. 

Three geese (Juniper's photo.)

One of the many lizards you catch darting about here and there (Linden's picture)

In a little gazebo on our walk

The whole crew, walking down the stone pathway...

... and taking a break on a bench

As I write this, I have an entire day of pictures and stories waiting to be crafted (and a busy day it was!), so I will leave this here for the night, and hope to get back at it again in a couple of days, to not lose too many details. But my plan is to post again soon, so stay tuned!