Man oh man oh man. What a crazy time it has already been. Luckily everyone is safe and sound and we have successfully made it to Lithuania! I still hardly can believe it is real. Before I dive into Lithuania, I am just going to rewind to Wednesday where it all began. Wednesday was a bad boy. I woke up after hardly sleeping (I was way way too excited), and I finally finished packing. By some miracle, My bags weighed just about what they needed to. Hallelujah! After, I went to go get my eyebrows waxed, (I had to have good eyebrows, I mean these pics will follow me forever), went to go visit my Becca Boo (She is my favorite human), and finally went back home for my cute Josh boy to come pick me up. Sadly, my parents were on vacation with my family and they couldn't take me to the airport, so my grand plan was to have Josh take me to my grandparents who would take me to the airport. (Complicated I know.)
Josh came to get me and we went on our way. The nice boy decided to buy me my last American meal, so we stopped at Einstein Bagels and I had the most delicious sandwich on a bagel. (I practically salivate just thinking about it.) After we were done we scadattled to my Grandmas. We got lost cause I am the worst at directions, so we got there a bit after schedule. By this point I was pretty much freaking out. I had a super quick goodbye to Josh and we were in the car again off to get to the airport!
When we got to the airport, I was the last one there. I felt soooooo bad because I am supposed to be the one in charge and I was the last one to actually arrive. Once I got to the terminal, I found all the the girls really quick. I LOVE them. Not only are they all beautiful, but they are so kind and funny. I can just tell we have a great group and they will be willing to do anything to help the kids learn. While we were sitting and chatting, the plane arrived. The front cockpit window on the right side looked totally broken. Every 10 minutes the nice airport woman would say something along the lines of, "the plane is leaving on schedule because the plane is broken and we are fixing it so you don't die" (or at least that is what it translated to in Mikele Language.) An hour later, they just started boarding the plane. It was ridiculous! I was at least lucky enough to sit by Rachel a cute girl in my group. The whole time we were just sitting there freaking out about missing our flight to Denmark. Not only was it our longest flight, but I felt like it was our most important one. If we missed it, we would miss our flight to Lithuania and it would probably be a few more days before we could arrive and preparation for teaching would be much more stressful. Bottom line was I didn't care if we had to run full speed, we were making that flight.
When the plane finally arrived in Chicago, I hurried to text Jessica another ILP volunteer who was meeting up with us. She told me that to get to our gate, we had to take a tram. She also said that the whole tram/ gate finding process took her over an hour. We had about 35 minutes. Things were not looking too hot for us. After finding the tram station we were pretty much in panic mode. There were no trams in sight and we didn't have time to wait. I was frantically running everywhere trying to find out why there were no trams. Finally, a tram came and we hopped on board. Our tram stop was the very last one. (Of course.) Since we had about 8ish minutes on the tram, I was able to text Jessica and tell her to try to hold the plane for us. She said that they told us 10 more minutes and they would leave us. We were not feeling very hopeful. When we finally got off that tram ride that felt like an eternity, we booked it full speed to the airport security. Security knew we were coming and the sweet black mama security guard helped me to laugh and calm down. (I will for sure be thanking her personally when I see her in heaven.) After we were done getting checked we had to run full speed to the terminal. This is not a time where the phrase "full speed" is exaggerated. I was running so fast that when my rolly bag hit a bump and flipped over, I didn't even stop running. I just kept pulling and running as fast as I could literally dragging my suitcase behind me. Eventually I stopped to flip it over when a meanie face flight attendant told me we had already missed our flight. Luckily he had a non-meanie faced friend with him who told me he was joking. I flipped that suitcase over as fast as I could and picked up speed. When I finally got to the terminal, everyone was waiting for us. They checked our tickets and sweat dripping all down my face and neck I could finally board the plane. When we got on the plane it was a tad awkward. By our appearance everyone could tell we were "those people" the ones who stalled the plane. All I can say is good thing most of them didn't speak English so we didn't know what they were saying about us! I was so thankful that I made that plane and so exhausted in every way possible, I had quite a nice Scandinavian Air sleep. Good thing Copenhagen was so wonderful that all this trouble was worth it!
XO Mikele