Home at last!

Well, after a trip that can only be described as eventful, we’re finally home! We left our rental house in St. Andrews yesterday at 8:30 in the morning, local time in Scotland. I had gone for one last run on the Lade Braes at six in the morning while David finished backing the last bags, and though we got up quite early, we still ran out of time at the end. As the taxi pulled up at the front of the house, I was hanging towels out on the line and David was stuffing stuffed animals into one last carry-on bag and prioritizing the contents of the refrigerator to decide what items were worthy of an attempt to get through security (does Nutella count as a “gel”?). I mopped 800 square feet of tile in about 29 seconds, which must be some kind of record somewhere, and we got out of the house only fifteen minutes later than we had planned. Our hour ride to the Edinburgh airport was uneventful—the sun was out and the kids were completely silent in the back seat, just looking out the window at all the little villages we passed through so many times in our semester in Scotland for one last time.

When we arrived at the airport, we learned that our flight to Newark was delayed, and there was a long, long queue of people waiting to check in. Most of them were golfers returning to the States from St. Andrews, and they had one big hard case of golf clubs and one small carry on suitcase. David and I, on the other hand, looked like two tinkers pushing our enormous carts piled high with duffels and suitcases and warm coats and pillows and more stuffed animals towards the check-in counter. When we arrived, the airline representative behind the counter eyed us warily and said, “You know you can only have one bag each, then?” We ended up checking eight bags, all of which came at least 2 kg under the weight limit (and since David had used the scale in the house to check the weight of the bags by holding them while he stepped on the scale, I could see him do some quick mental calculations with the hope that the scale in the house was a bit off and he hadn’t gained as much weight as he thought on this trip!). We were left with six very heavy carry-ons plus the kids backpacks (filled mostly with stuffed animals, of course) to get through security. That was no problem in the end, though two of our bags were flagged for a search because they had the kids’ metal water bottles (which were empty) in them. I set off the metal detector for some reason and was treated to a full arms-up-legs-apart body pat-down while David and the kids chuckled, which wasn’t as bad as it sounds. I emerged feeling as if I had just been treated to a free massage!

The flight itself was fabulous…it was light outside the whole time and we each had one of those in-flight entertainment systems in front of us loaded with movies and TV shows. They served us two meals and lots of drinks while the kids watched “The Tooth Fairy” and David and I cycled through movies with titles too embarrassing to name—movies we would never choose to watch on our own, but which ended up being quite good. We landed in Newark at almost 3:00 pm, and quickly went through security, and then customs. I was worried that the sheer volume of our luggage would warrant an immediate search through all of them at customs, in the hopes by a customs official of finding an undisclosed can of haggis or boxes of shortbread that totaled more than $800 in total value in our bags, but they basically just waved us through in the end. So I was feeling quite good that we had made it back to the States in the end with no problems! And then the fun began…

I’ll back up one quick step to explain that our travel arrangements were a bit odd to begin with, because in the fall, as we were booking our trip, the university’s travel agency “forgot” to book the last leg of the return trip, which would return us all the way to Syracuse for an hour drive back to Hamilton. There was a bit of back and forth between us and the travel agency and Colgate’s off-campus study office to decide who had made the mistake, and what to do about it. In the end, it was decided that we would just collect all of our bags in Newark and be met by a limo service for the four hour drive back to Hamilton, since it would probably take as much time in the end for us to recheck our bags onto a domestic flight, wait for the connection, fly to Syracuse, collect our bags and drive home. So, when we emerged from baggage claim with our two trolleys, our limo driver took one look at us and said, “You know, your travel agency sent a sedan, right?” A sedan. As in a car with four to five seats and a trunk big enough for two good-size duffels and no more. I stared at him blankly for what felt like an eternity, wondering how on earth a travel agency could send a sedan to pick up four people from an international flight, especially when they had booked the airplane tickets for us in the first place, and knew that we would have been in the UK for five months and therefore likely had more luggage with us than just two duffels! So, we stood in baggage claim for well over an hour, running through all the options (hiring a second cab to take the luggage to Hamilton was going to be over $600, asking our limo company to send a car for the luggage the next day would be $500, after we paid to have the luggage stored for a day, shipping the luggage was going to be $700, etc…). In the end, we decided that our only option was to send all of our luggage in the sedan with the driver (and I might add that it barely fit by itself…with the trunk, the back seat and the passenger seat fully loaded) and then for us to rent a car at Newark and drive home. The idea of this wasn’t appealing, as it was now about 11:00 pm Scotland time and we were just ready to sleep, not to drive four hours. We also didn’t have a map with us, and we don’t know the drive well enough to do it without directions. So, we rented a GPS system as well, loaded into a car, and started inching through Friday-evening interstate rush hour traffic.

The drive wasn’t easy. David did all the driving while I tried to keep him awake by saying, “What are you thinking about now?” repeatedly. I figured it was better to have him awake and annoyed than falling asleep at the wheel. An hour in, we pulled off the interstate when we saw a sign for a Wendy’s, but we never could find the Wendy’s in the end, and just ended up getting rerouted through an hour of 30 mile-per-hour roads near Parsippany, NJ. After we finally got onto another interstate (I-84) our GPS went out, so we were on our own from there (though were more familiar with that part of the drive, fortunately). We still hadn’t had dinner and the kids were alternating between sleeping in the back seat and moaning about how uncomfortable they were. In Clarks Summit, we finally pulled off for some dinner, and I switched seats with John and put him in the front with the seat all the way back so he could sleep without his head banging into the door all the time. Emma was propped up on my shoulder and John’s reclined seat was in my lap with my right leg trapped between it and the door. At about that point, as we got off I-81 and onto the two-lane highways for the last 90 minutes of the drive, a police officer pulled us over. She must have been quite shocked to see the seating arrangement we had fashioned for ourselves, and I craned my head around David’s shoulder to explain the whole thing (“You see, we live in Hamilton but we’ve been in the UK for five months? So we flew into Newark and rented this car? And we’re not really used to the time here yet, which is why they’re asleep like this? And I normally wouldn’t let him sit up there, but his head was banging against the window because he’s so tired?”). She ignored me, and turned to David instead and asked, “Do you know how fast you were going, sir?” He shrugged sheepishly, and muttered something about not being used to the speedometer on the rental car, and she let him go without a ticket, so we drove off, while I was still calling out to the officer through the opened window, “So in the UK the car speedometers are marked in kilometers, you see, but the road signs are in miles? So it can be kind of confusing? And this car is a Chrysler, which neither of us have ever driven before?...”

We finally made it home at about 10:00 pm U.S. time (really, really late Scotland time) and met the limo driver at our house (he was sleeping in his sedan in the driveway when we finally arrived, probably an hour and a half behind him). I put the kids to bed while David carried in all of our luggage and we went right to sleep, with just enough energy left over to peel my contact lenses off of my eyeballs and to exclaim how incredibly, ridiculously comfortable our own bed was after sleeping on not much more than a box spring for the last five months!