Today would be a long day of travel. We expected to be traveling over 34 hours from door to door as we headed back to Minnesota. We slept in and did initial packing. Then got up and had a big breakfast at the hotel. We had asked for a little bit late check out to take some pressure off so we had a chance to finish packing and work on some blog and picture posts.
Then we went up and checked out, having had such a fine experience in this peaceful hotel. It was definitely the favorite of the hotels we had stayed in in southern Africa. Very peaceful and the staff were all top level, good people.
So then we were transported to the airport with some extra time there, went through border control to officially leave Zimbabwe before settling in at our departure gate. Patti did some shopping while Dick continued to hang out and work on Photos. We boarded our plane without problems.
Then, onto Johannesburg, South Africa, where we had five hours in the airport there. We went through South African Border Control and had a chance for a bit of a nap. Their concept of a transit zone is different from other countries. Once we could finally see our departure gate announced we moved to find it. We soon found that we had to go through their security before we could proceed to our gate.
We settled in at our gate and got all of our electronics charging on the one outlet in the whole room. A garbled announcement was made and some of the people around us began to move. To our surprise, that announcement was that everyone was going to have to go through another security inspection at a temporary arrangement of tables. No x-ray, just poking through our carry-ons. A very nice gate agent helped us jump the line. Everyone around us was a bit baffled by the process. The biggest surprise was that they would not allow any plastic water bottles to be taken on the plane, whether full or empty. We had just purchased a new bottle of water for the flight. After another 90 minutes we boarded our plane and started the 16 hour flight to Atlanta, Georgia.
What a long flight this was, cramped in the cheap seats at the back of the plane. The crew did not seem to understand that we arrived on board without water. We had to seek it out regularly. This kind of flight has to be endured and we did. We arrived in Atlanta a little before eight in the morning. We’re now onto June 2.
We had enough time to clear American customs and get on the final plane going up to Minneapolis Saint Paul. Why are we not going home? Because our car is at Patti’s mom’s house. We will have nearly two weeks in Minnesota before we start the long journey back to California.
All the flights were uneventful and we slept as much as we could. We knew we were gonna be so topsy-turvy by the time we got home.
When we landed in Minneapolis in Saint Paul on time, we were able to go over collect our luggage and hop on a shuttle going from the airport down to Rochester, Minnesota where Patti’s brother picked us up and brought us over to her mom’s House.
We had been to Africa and now we’re back. Wow.
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