Ethiopia - part 6 - coming home

The girls will smile until they see the light on our camera. That's why in every pivture they look like this . I SWEAR they have gorgeous smiles that they give us all day!

About the Ghion hotel...we stayed there for the majority of our trip to Ethiopia and i would recommend it to people in situations like ours. However, if you are planning to go to Ethiopia to adopt one child, i would highly recommend the Hilton hotel in Addis. The Hilton is as close to being back in America as you will find (unless you can shell out the $$$ to stay at the Sheraton and then i would say "more power to ya"). Isaac has been on several international mission trips. Before we had the girls with us full-time his ability to adapt to the culture around him was fairly easy. However once we had the girls with us the priority shifted to : protecting our fragile, tiny babies. At that point we had to move from our guest house to a place that was more accommodating for our situation of 2 tiny babies and 3 adults.

If the Hilton is booked or you have more than one child you're going to get, i would recommend the Ghion Hotel's "apartments" which they call the "riviera". We enjoyed having our own "space" and the gardens off our porch at the Ghion.

On Wednesday at 4:20pm we had the paperwork from the American embassy necessary for the girls to enter the US. We were cleared to fly! We had all day Thursday to pack. The CWA driver was supposed to pick us up to take us to the airport about 8pm. He got there a little early (7 ish) just as i was going to the lobby to pay our bill and check out. The woman at the front desk informed me that after 5pm they could not run credit cards over $500. This was a problem. When we checked in we told the front desk we would be staying half the day on Thursday bc/ we weren't flying out until late at night. They assured us it was fine but that we would be charged for half a day. We made sure they took credit card (we were running out of cash fast). However, they forgot to tell us about the after-5pm-credit card deal. So now we were stuck at the Ghion with no way to settle our bill as it was after 5pm. I called back to the room to tell Isaac and Claire to count every American dollar we had and see if we could come up with enough cash for our bill to only have to charge $500. When all the cash was counted we were VERY CLOSE. we actually asked the woman if we could possibly keep $50 cash bc, after all, we were flying internationally. She agreed. After much nail-biting everything went through and we were on our way to the airport.
(Elijah feeding Aliyah - 6 days home)

The flight home was intense. Thankfully we were able to get bulk-head seating and have a (ONE) bassinet set up for girls. Clarie and I kept a baby in the moby or sling pretty much the entire 29+ hours it took to fly into Asheville. Isaac was the "pack horse" who carried all our carry-on luggage. It was tense to fly half way around the world with these tiny, fragile babies. It felt like we would never get home. We flew from Addis to Amsterdam, from Amsterdam to Detroit and from Detroit to Asheville. Landing in Detroit we knew we would have to go through customs and immigration. We had the girls' visa packets ready. Unfortunately our flight in Amsterdam had been delayed an hour and so we had exactly ONE hour in Detroit to get though customs, immigration, re-check our luggage and catch our flight to Asheville. It wasn't enough time. Once we reached the luggage check we had exactly 10 min's before our flight was to leave. In a panic we asked the attendant if they could call to hold the flight for us and she told us the flight was delayed 20 min's. Then she told us our gate was on the other side of the Detroit airport and we would have to RUN (her exact words), there were no more flights to asheville that night. This was the 21st of March and Elijah's birthday. I had not flown half way around the world to be stuck in the Detroit airport all night and miss my child's 8th birthday. SO WE RAN. Isaac said it was about a mile. Aliyah bounced along in the sling while i ran, Ariel bounced along in the moby while Claire ran and Isaac brought up the rear carrying all 5 of our carry-ons. We made it to the gate DRIPPING with sweat and exhausted and there everyone sat. When we asked what was going on we were told the pilot had "somehow" gotten confused about the flights and was running late. 10 min's later he showed up and we boarded our plane home! another miracle.