Back in the Saddle

As in, I'm back in Korea!  What can I say, but I love Korea and I love coming back as much as I can.  I'm traveling with the Holt Gift Team again.  This wasn't planned until I was in Portland and my good friend Debbie stated she was going this year and that I should go too.  Well...I first had to wait and see if I had to serve on a jury and I wouldn't know until after 5:00pm November 5th.  I made the call on Nov. 5th and nope, I didn't have to serve so the decision was made that I was headed to Korea in three weeks!

I flew into San Francisco November 30th so I wouldn't have to be rushed December 1st to catch the international flight to Seoul.  Good move so I didn't feel anxiety or panic having to worry about connections and good thing since San Francisco had been having rain since Thursday so flights were already delayed in and out of SFO.

December 1st and it was time to head to the airport to catch the 10:40am flight to Seoul.  Everyone met up and ate breakfast together then headed back to the gate to wait to board.  All went smoothly until take off.  We departed  late, but was at least on the runway...for 3 hours!  I couldn't believe we were still on the runway!  I took out my phone to text home to let hubby know what was going, he couldn't believe it either, I should have been in the air three hours already!  

I had hubby look online to see what was being said.  Stated something to do with cargo load, but that didn't make sense.  The announcement came on saying something about getting the numbers correct...what?  Then we started to head back to the gate...not looking good!  Guess we needed a mechanic to come look at the plane.

Guess the problem had been fixed and we were off again, yeah!  Back to the runway...not so fast, we began turning around again!  So we sat for a bit until the announcement came on saying the paperwork wasn't coming thru the database and we had to wait for the final paperwork for the FAA.  We were approaching 3 1/2 hours of delay now.  I wasn't feeling very confident we would actually take off because the crew would have to be rotated to a whole new crew but then again, there wouldn't be another plane available for an international flight, right?

Just when I was giving up hope, we were taking off this time....but I wasn't going to really be happy until I saw us really take off...and we did!  There was a lot more turbulence this time around than I remember with the other flights and with all that had happened prior to take off, i really did some heavy praying that all was ok.

I watched one movie on the plane as we did not have the individual screens on this flight so after the one movie, I listened to my music and tried to sleep.  I was in the window seat so I was pretty much stuck there for almost the entire time, but I did manage to get to the restroom two times.  

We landed in Seoul around 7:00pm Korea time, three hours late, but at least we were finally here!!

So onto the week of busy activities.  Today was the Holt office visit, toured the brand new office building which was very nice.  While we were at the Post Adoption Services building, I got some great news that I was going to be able to do something Friday afternoon that I had been wanting to do for a long time...I'll save that for later when it happens so stay tuned!!