Ethiopia Trip - Day 1

For the next few days I'm going to write a series of posts about our trip to Ethiopia.  I took a journal with me and documented each day but I would still like to post about it here too with some pictures.  Speaking of pictures Brian found my camera cord!!!!  I was SO excited!  So, today we will start out with the first day of our trip! :)

We woke up super early on Thursday, August 1st and headed to Charlotte.  Our flight left at 5:45am.  My dad was nice enough to pick us up from our house around 3:00 AM and drive us to the airport.  We had all of our bags and everything ready to begin our journey!

The benefit of your flight leaving at 5:45am is that you get to see the sun rising up through the clouds.  It was breathtaking.  This picture definitely doesn't do it justice.  After a quick hour and a half we landed at Dulles near Washington DC.  That little plane is the one we flew in.  It landed and they let us out on the tarmac.  We headed inside of the airport and made it through customs and everything pretty quickly.  We found our gate which was conveniently located near this beauty!  We had breakfast, bought some magazines to read on the plane, and walked around before boarding our plane.

 
Our flight to Ethiopia was VERY crowded.  I didn't see an empty seat.  The flight that we took to Ethiopia is a direct flight on Ethiopian Airlines.  There were no other stops!  13 1/2 hours was the estimated time for the flight.  The tail of the plane has the flag colors and you can see the Lion of Judah on the front there!  

 Once we boarded the flight we got settled in for the long haul.  There was a really nice Ethiopian lady that sat beside me.  She was friends with one of the stewardesses so she would get special snacks occasionally and she always shared with us.  So nice!  One thing I will say is that Ethiopian Air makes sure you never go hungry...thirsty maybe...hungry no.  They fed us so much.  They would wake us up early to eat meals.  The food was actually pretty good.  Some things were not but most everything we ate on the plane was good.  There were screens on the seats in front of us, headphones, blankets, pillows, and eye masks for everyone.  They had several different movies and lots of music to listen to and a fun map screen to show us exactly where we were at all times!  We slept a little bit but not a lot.

We arrived in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia early Friday morning.  We passed through immigration again, showed our visas, and then headed to pick up our luggage.  We waited and waited and didn't see our luggage anywhere but we took comfort in the fact that there were lots of other people from our flight that were still waiting on their luggage too.  After a long time, all of it arrived and we grabbed our bags quickly and headed outside.  Well, we TRIED to head outside but someone that really really wanted to help us grabbed our bags and insisted on pushing them.  We said, "No, thank you, we are fine."  He didn't take no for an answer.  We let him push our bags to the door, tipped him, and saw our driver and soon to be friend, Wass.  He was holding a sign that had our agency's name on it.  He took us to his van and we hopped in!  He drove us through the city, up and down hills, around people and animals, and telling us all about the city the whole while.

 We FINALLY made it to the guest house!  This is a picture of us in our room before we met our baby girl.  Tomorrow's post will be all about the first moment that we met her!