On our way to Zambia! Well, sort of anyway

This morning started with excitement… anticipation… nervous energy. We started actively moving on an adoption in November 2009. It took us 8 months to select a country. We put the process on hold as I accepted a call at a new church and we moved to Florida, but then we started right back into the process. We spent hours filling out paperwork. We decided to keep going even after the adoption agency we were with closed their Zambia program (remember it took us 8 months to decide on Zambia – we weren’t changing!). But we kept going through all of that because we were convinced that we had a child waiting for us to come rescue him or her.

All of that led us to today – the day we left our house. The day our journey began. The day that started with excitement, anticipation and nervous energy as we were finally traveling to find our child! We fly out of Philly on Tuesday, but, in trying to save some money, we used reward tickets to fly up from Florida. Unfortunately, because it is a holiday weekend, the only reward tickets we could get took us through St. Louis.

Well, as today turned out, our two hour layover in St Louis is now a 2 day stopover in St Louis. We boarded our flight and the flight attendants told us they were trying to board us quickly because a bad storm cell was on the way. In fact, at least once, they thought we were clear to push back from the gate and head out. Each time it looked like we were about to get clearance, the lightning picked up again.

Then, the shaking. I’ve never been shaken. I’ve never experienced anything like this and I’m sure glad that we were on the ground as the plane was shaking all over. They called an emergency evacuation of the plane and we went running off the plane and up a dark path as the power was out. A tornado had hit the airport! All the windows in the main terminal were blown out. Once everyone was off, I ran back down and onto the plane to get our carry-on that contained all of our adoption paperwork. We did not want to lose that!

We spent the next hour and a half waiting in limbo to find out what would happen next. At one point, I was looking out the window and saw a group of airline employees gathered around the plane taking pictures on their phones. Here’s guessing that if airline employees are taking pictures of the plane, then there was some damage that they’d never seen before!

Finally, they announced that flights were canceled and the airport was closing. We could call or wait in line at the front ticket counter to get rebooked. After half an hour on the phone with the airline, she is told that because we were flying on reward tickets, we couldn’t be rebooked! We would have to wait in line as they would be able to do a manual override.

At this point, I called LaQuinta where I have a bunch of reward points and booked a room for the night. Actually, the agent on the phone went through the whole process to book a room for us. Right as he was going through the final confirmation I asked, “And that is the airport location, right?” Good thing I asked! He was about to book us at another location. So then he corrected the reservation and booked the room.

Meanwhile, Kim is now waiting in line for ticketing. We tagged on and off for a while – the whole wait was about an hour and a half. While waiting, they told us that we were going to have to pick up all our luggage, so I went down to get it. But wait, they weren’t releasing the luggage because there was word of a natural gas leak. They had called the fire department, but couldn’t do anything until cleared by the fire department.

As Kim was finally making progress in line, they announced that luggage was now available. I went down to pick up all our luggage and call the hotel to request a shuttle. Kim made it to the ticket counter and successfully rebooked us into Philly… on Sunday! So, now we have not one, but two unexpected nights in St Louis!

But wait, there’s more. So now we have tickets for Sunday, but no way to get to our hotel. Because of damage around the airport, roads were closing and the shuttle was not allowed through to the terminal. Taxi it is. The taxi driver (from Kenya!) loaded all our bags into the minivan and carefully navigated around the damage and delivered us safely to the LaQuinta, from where I am writing this.

A long, crazy day and we didn’t even get any closer to Philly than when we started the day in Sarasota. But our child is waiting. We will go through anything to get to Zambia and have our family united finally. Child, we haven’t even met you yet, but we love you. Nothing, not even a tornado, can keep us from you. We’re coming.

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PS> Have to say one last thing about this crazy day. Jeremiah was incredible. He was so good. Really, amazing. Praise God for that boy. If ever there was a day that he could have snapped and it would have been understandable, this was it. But he was amazing. Son, we love you so much and we are so proud of you today!