Wednesday Night: 6:30 pm. Take Kevin to OHS; drop his suitcase and passport with the tour group for safe-keeping
7:30 pm.: Send-off Concert begins. Mozart, Vivaldi, Bach, Barber, some American composer I forget, Copland, Sibelius. As I’ve told Kevin (and he agrees) there is nothing ‘bad’ by Sibelius. It is all awesome
9 pm: Back home. Last minute packing begins for the family.
11:15 pm: US Soccer on TV against Mexico. Kevin in bed (he knows what is coming). Boys in bed.
Thursday 12:15 am: US up 2-0. Dad goes to bed. Suzanne still getting her stuff straightened away
4:15 am: Wake-up time. Kevin is driving us to the airport (we are leaving from Lansing) and then driving back to get on the bus to go to Germany
4:40 am: Leave house.
4:50 am: Suzanne asks me if I have our passports. I do not.
5 am: Leave house again. Stress level very high because our flight leaves at 5:50 am….and it is going to be tight!
5:20 am; Arriving at Delta counter in Lansing. Clear first hurdle…we made it to the counter in time to check our luggage before they closed the counter to go work with the plane. Bad news though, we have to make it through security too….and the line is as long as I’ve ever seen it in Lansing (three flights are leaving between 5:50 and 6 am)
5:45 am: I clear security first just as the announcement “….party of four, this is your final boarding call, the door is closing in one minute” occurs. We literally get on the plane and they do shut the door.
5: 50 am: Leave Lansing
6:20 am: Land in Detroit
6:30 am: Kevin’s show-up time at OHS for the bus. The 80-something kids who are going are on two flights, most on Lufthansa, the cellos, because Lufthansa has a very expensive cello baggage fee, are on Delta. BUT, Lufthansa pilots are on a three-day strike, the OHS flight was cancelled Monday am. After some scrambling, they get the kids moved to a United flight out of Chicago….they have to leave earlier now and because of the ice storm forecasted for today, it’s even earlier, 6:30 instead of 7. Of course, Kevin has been up since 4:15 so this isn’t an issue.
7:55 am: Leave Detroit for Cincinnati. We got some pretty cheap airfares, but, they did require a strange routing to make it happen.
8:50 am: Land in Cincinnati.
9:15 am: Kevin reports bus is going very slow, ice storm along I-94 on Lake Michigan has made the road very tough.
9:55 am: Leave Cincinnati for Fort Lauderdale
12 pm: Land in Fort Lauderdale. Will describe the rest of our day in detail in the next post.
12:05 pm: Kevin sends us a picture of smoke and flames on an O’Hare runway. Says bus went to the wrong terminal, but, all good now.
3:52 pm: Kevin was supposed to leave at 3:30 pm…..I’ve skipped the security and other posts to get to this one “Mechanical problem on plane. Had to get off’
5 pm: First updated time for departure comes and goes
6:45 pm: Second updated time for departure comes and goes
7 pm: Last two texts from Kevin before he left “BOARDING AGAIN”. “Went from a middle seat to an aisle seat. This wasn’t all bad”
Friday, 3:23 am: “Landed in Frankfurt”
6:34 am: “Our bus was an hour late on top of everything else. With host family now.”
