Monday night we went out for a last Kansas City dinner with some of our friends... of course it was Jack Stack. I'm drooling thinking about it now. We got back to the hotel around 9 and realized we had less than 6 hours before we would be headed to the airport. The 2:30AM alarm came TOO soon.
Josh had made sure when requesting a shuttle to the airport to let them know we needed A LOT of space for luggage. Well, that happened. We had our own "short bus" :) Complete with terrible suspension. It was a bumpy, cold ride. Liam snoozed on my lap. We made it and that's all that matters! We checked in our massive amounts of luggage and went through security. It was time for takeoff!
We flew Delta from Kansas City to Los Angeles. It was almost 4 hours. Liam was pretty good and only got wild maybe an hour of the trip? He snoozed for two of the other hours and behaved himself for one. When we arrived at LAX, we got settled in the International Wing. Because we were flying Business class, we got to hang out in the "business lounge". Fancy stuff. My focus was on how to wear my child out before the next leg of our trip. We walked all over the place. It wasn't enough, but worth the try.
The next flight we would take was from LAX to Seoul, South Korea. This was the big kahuna. The dreaded flight. The "can't turn back halfway across the ocean" flight. We were flying Asiana airline. Josh had never flown Asiana before so none of us were sure what to expect. It turned out to be a very nice airplane with incredible service! We had "Pods" which gave us a decent amount of space to sit and for our "stuff". Mine and Liam's pod were together in the middle and Josh's on the side. We were flying in one of the cool double decker planes.
Smiles before takeoff! Well, except Liam. He hates having his picture taken these days.
Liam slept for the first two hours.
I should have slept too, but I decided to eat the 5-course meal they brought me while it was hot (rare occurance) and drink a glass of wine.
After Liam woke up the fun began. We did everything to keep him as calm and happy as possible. This included hours of NURSING. Ouch. We read books, tried to watch movies, sang songs, shared snacks. You name it... we did it! It was pretty exhausting. But we survived. That's what counts!
We landed smoothly in Seoul. We knew we only had about 40 minutes before our next flight took off by the time we were able to exit the plane. This included collecting our stroller (which took time and threw us to the back of the security line which was FOREVER LONG), then rushing through a very busy airport with our carry-ons, stroller, Liam, and BIG OLE car seat. It was super fun. And by super fun I mean super stressful. As far as we knew while we were standing in the back of the security line with our fussy toddler, they were boarding our airplane to Bangkok. We tried pretty hard to communicate to the airport staff that we needed to catch another flight, but they didn't get it. We finally made it out of the security line and practically ran to the gate of our flight to Bangkok. We get there and see that they had DELAYED our flight to Bangkok because of our connecting flight from Seoul! We were relieved and a bit irritated. And we were NOT excited about getting on another long flight at this point. We had almost been awake for 24 hours at this point. Ugh. Anyways, it was finally time to board our last flight from Seoul to Bangkok.
He really is a rockstar for hanging in there.
This was a flight on a single deck Asiana plane. Not as cozy as our long flight, but it was alright. We ate another large 5 course meal and thankfully all of us slept a little bit. We. Were. Exhausted. Liam was awake the last hour and a half of the flight, when I was the MOST tired. He wasn't. :)
We finally, FINALLY landed at Suvarnabhuvi airport in Bangkok. What an AMAZING feeling to get off that last plane. Josh was a bit stressed about going through customs, however, the PERK of having traveled with an infant was that we got to go through the priority line. HOORAY. Let me say that again. HOORAY. The non-priority line would have been a nightmare. Liam wanted to get out and run like a maniac at this point. We got through customs without a fuss. Next was on to the luggage claim. When we saw our first of nine bags come up the ramp we were THRILLED. They had MADE IT!! Josh was a beast and pulled all nine of them off (mind you they all weighed >50 lbs) the first time they went around. And then an angel appeared.. haha! It was actually an airport employee who said he might be able to find us a large luggage cart! We had NO idea how else we would have managed everything we had plus Liam. He did indeed find us a luggage cart and helped us load up. We made our way towards the exit of the airport...our last stop was to take all of our luggage through customs. Ugh. Could of been a total nightmare. They must have known what we had just been through... or they decided that going through our bags would be a nightmare for THEM. :) Anyways, we walked right on through and got into our van to take us to the hotel.
Our hotel is the big tower behind this shopping mall named "Terminal 21"
We arrived at the Grand Centre Point hotel in downtown Bangkok around 11:30pm Bangkok time. That is 10:30am central American time. That means we left our hotel at 3:30am on Tuesday morning and arrived at 10:30am Wednesday morning. Yep... 32 hours. At this point our gas tanks were on empty and we were on pure adrenalin! Let the adventure begin.
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