But researching it more started to really scare me. Apparently, after the Paris attacks, Rome (specifically the Vatican), London and Washington D.C had been named as future targets. I thought about Rome during Holy week being one of the busiest times. I thought about the Vatican on Easter Sunday... I read about all the terrorist suspects they were tracking. In all honesty, if we could have gotten a full refund for the trip, I probably would have cancelled. But we couldn't, and I, too, believed that there would be tighter security and that the likelihood of anything happening while we were there was minimal. We would take extra precautions as well. The fact that this happened the day before our trip definitely took away some of the whole experience for me and I was unreasonably nervous during various parts of our trip, but such is life right?
The first flight was on Wednesday, March 23 at 5pm. I checked in the day before and luckily we all got seats together! We left Escondido early, around 930am. I think we got to LAX around 1130, maybe noon and went straight to the place to park our car. It was pretty close to LAX, maybe a 10 minute drive at most. We parked the car, gave them keys and waited a bit for the airport shuttle. The place worked out well for us. It was outdoor parking and seemed secure. I doubt I would leave a brand new car in a lot such as this, but for an older car its totally fine. The guy that drove the shuttle to the airport was nice and by the time we got to the airport it was about 100pm-ish. There were a few people already in line. I wasn't sure when the agents would come, but luckily it was only a 20 minute wait and they were there to check people in. Everything went smoothly at check in, although we narrowly missed a potentially huge problem. Apparently, when I entered in Veena's name , I left out the S in DAVIS. Normally there can be no name changes, but the agent we worked with was nice. She casually mentioned what happened and said she cleared it with her boss, so there would be no problems at all. Phew. For someone that checks and double checks and triple checks EVERYTHING, I don't even know how that happened.
Once we checked in, we went through security. Because we had the strollers, we were allowed to go in a special line and we literally walked passed hundreds of people. It was so awesome! One of the few perks of traveling with kids I guess. Security was also a breeze and by the time we were done we were all very hungry. We got some food near the gate. By the time we got to the gate, we only had to wait around about an 1hr, which was awesome. Veena had fallen asleep right before lunch, so we let her run around while we waited at the gate.
We boarded the plane and got our seats. The girls were overjoyed when they saw the little screens at each chair. They did amazingly the entire trip. They basically watched shows, ate, dozed off and watched some more shows the entire 12hr, 25 minute flight.
Veena did pretty good. Not as well as the others from my recollection, but good enough for a baby. Because she had taken that nap during lunch she wasn't really tired right away. She was awake for a good few hours after boarding and with no place else to go besides my lap, was a little restless. She wanted to touch everything. Oh, yeah, and she pretty much only wanted me. It was like breastfeeding a newborn for part of the flight, but I was glad I at least had that. She finally did go to sleep and overall she did really good.
We landed in Moscow and it was raining! We had to go outside to get on a coach to get to the terminal. There we waited for about 3.5 hours. We walked around, fed the kids, and Daniel and I had some coffee. Veena was getting restless in the stroller so we let her walk around while we followed. Overall the time went by fairly quickly.
We had to again go outside in the rain to board our flight. It was cold and rainy. Luckily it wasn't very long. But, we were standing behind these two guys that seemed a little shady to me. Once they sat down, one of them kept looking back. All the 911 stories started replaying in my head and I got super anxious. I told Daniel and he thought I was crazy. He wasn't concerned at all. That relaxed me a bit, but not much because Daniel doesn't get concerned with much. I held my breath, but luckily nothing bad happened. The kids all slept the entire flight and once we landed I was oh so relieved to have made in safely.
Once we landed the stewardess told us that our strollers would be outside. We went outside the aircraft where they normally would be but didn't see anything. We asked another employee walking by if it would be at baggage claim and she said yes. I wasn't very confident if she understood me or if she knew what she was saying yes to, but we went with it.
Once we got to baggage claim, Daniel quickly got our suitcases. Still no strollers. I panicked of course. Got anxious thinking that our shuttle wouldn't wait for us, we'd have to search and search for our strollers. We couldn't just go back to the plane because we had to take a tram to get to the baggage claim. It seemed like hours, but Daniel found our strollers probably within 15 minutes and we were on our way out.
I was told on the Expedia paperwork that someone would be waiting for us after baggage claim with our names on a sign. We walk out of baggage claim and there were tons of people with names on papers. We walked past every one of them with no sight of our name. And of course, yup, you guessed it, I panicked a little. I finally asked someone and showed them the name of the shuttle we were waiting for. He pointed to some people that were right behind us and low and behold our name was on their sign. Phew. We waited for the shuttle and got on. We were the first to be dropped off. We checked into our hotel. The lobby was awesome and the room was great! They put us in the room on the same floor as the breakfast area which was also great! The elevator was tiny and didn't hold all of our luggage, but luckily it was only 1 flight of stairs (downstairs) to get to our room.
We got to the room, unpacked, took showers and went to sleep. We were pretty exhausted by this point! The girls all had their own beds, which they thought was the coolest thing ever!
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