And we’re off!
Saturday we cleaned the house, piled up our twelve bags (six to check, six to carry on) and headed for the airport.
My nerves were beyond jangled. I love traveling, but the parts that take place in the airport are my least favorite when small children are involved. Mark kept grinning at me and telling me everything would be fine, and I kept saying, “I will be fine when we are all on the plane. The second plane, come to think of it. And who has the 3yo?”
One of the carryons turned out to be too big for Icelandair and had to be checked; before relinquishing it we pulled out two climbing helmets, a little backpack for 3yo, and spare traveling clothes for the two youngest children. In the end we checked seven rolling suitcases, packed with climbing gear, warm clothing, guidebooks, kitchen knives (yeah, I travel with the three essential kitchen knives now), toys, and shared full-size toiletries.
We flew Icelandair, which was pleasant; it had a sleek Euro feel about it, and the option of watching Disney movies dubbed into Icelandic. I did this for a while (verdict: Brave is amusing in Icelandic, because of the Celtic accent, and because people shout “hvað!?” a lot) but then switched to reading and drinking wine
Both activities went a long way toward de-jangling me.
The very worst part about flying with young children is the part in the airport where you wait for first your baggage and then the rental car. In our case it was especially long because the seven bags (including, you’ll remember, some stuff that we had planned on carrying on the plane) had not made it onto the connecting flight with us. Not a single one! So there was an interlude of waiting to talk to the baggage claim office.
After nearly nineteen years of marriage, Mark and I work together quite seamlessly most of the time; we each have the roles we have settled into and know what to expect from each other. I supervise the three youngest children’s packing and he supervises the teen boys’. He makes sure we have all the gear, I make sure we have all the clothes and toiletries (and we check with each other at the interfaces of the categories, like “fleece jackets” and “sunblock.”) Normally, travel crises are Mark’s department. But it turns out that if the baggage claim people don’t speak English very well, he wants me to help. Fortunately our 17yo could watch over the bags and small children, who were not going anywhere.
Mark canceled the van transport by which we had been planning to move the teenage boys and some of our bags to the apartment (it would not all fit in the rental; European minivans are designed to carry people or cargo but not both). He bought wine at the duty free shop in the airport, a Swiss rosé, and then we schlepped everything to the train station attached to the airport, where we had been promised was a full grocery store.
The three smallest kids stayed behind, on the floor, with Mark and the oldest.
We had another long wait before we got our seven-passenger van, which we had to locate in the rental garage by wandering around and pressing the unlock looking for the flashing headlights, and finally we were on the road.
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