Getting to Belgium- April 8-9

As Tyler was spending his first two weeks on the job in Belgium, Molly headed to Knoxville for a few weeks of visiting with friends and family and of course getting the final things ready.  With side trips to Cincinnati, McMinnville and Nashville, it was a full two weeks.  When Tyler returned, we shipped his passport to New York and began the wait... except FedEx SUCKS and did not get our overnight guaranteed package there overnight... it took 2 days. THANKS!  We finally got the passports and visas back the following Saturday and we were booked on a flight that Wednesday.  We made stops at all our favorite restaurants (more Mexican) and visited with some of our close friends in the meantime... NOW it's everyone's turn to come see us :)

With our lives packed up into 4 suitcases, 2 carry-ons and 2 backpacks, we were ready.  BTW, we mastered the pack and every bag came in at 49.5 lbs of the allowable 50! Huzzah!  Our flight was scheduled to leave Knoxville at about 2:30 PM on Wednesday.  The relocation people had made the flight arrangements and they only gave us a little over an hour for layover in Dulles... SO since Tyler is a part of this trip (for those who don't know about every other trip he takes doesn't go smoothly) we had a delay.  We had hopes that we would make it and hoof it to the gate JUST in time.  We boarded, pulled away from the gate and sat.  Then the pilot proceeded to inform us that air traffic control had given them a longer route than they had planned so we needed more fuel, so back into the gate we went and our hopes of making our flight evaporated.  I am not sure HOW we didn't have enough fuel. What if we had had to circle the airport a few times, or fly to another airport for some reason... YOU NEED EXTRA FUEL. (This is the second time in as many months that Tyler has returned to the gate for gas)  Anyway... we landed 5 minutes after our next flight had closed the doors so to customer service we went.  They put us on a flight out of Dulles later that night with a connection in Frankfurt, not great but at least we would still make it there by Thursday.  Well, 15 minutes before boarding the flight was suddenly cancelled for mechanical reasons.  Sucks but also glad not to have been on a plane with problems!  Back to customer service we go... Phone calls and line standing and a LONG exchange with the Lufthansa desk agents (because of course it was their first day on a new system) and we were on a plane to Munich with Lufthansa (originally supposed to be on United).  AND our luggage... No where to be found when we finally get to Brussels... of course.  I have always felt losing my luggage was the end of the world because I feel like everything I own is in there... well this time that was pretty literal!  Luckily two days later and two trips back to the airport and all bags were accounted for.

Everything we own!

Apparently it takes this many boarding passes for one person to get to Belgium