Day 1 (travel day, flight day, etc……) a very long start.
We normally don’t report on our outgoing journey, which is often why we don’t truly have Day 1’s and why this is more a narrative of the day with minimal pictures. But this was a very long journey that was a bit different for us, so we’re writing it up… So if you are here for the pictues, go ahead and skip Day 1, or skip to the TL;DR at the bottom 😉
Our day started out fairly normal. Well, except for we didn’t have to be at the airport at the crack’o’dawn. Oh and we had time to stop by a party. Yes, we briefly stopped by a cousin’s house to celebrate her daughter’s high school graduation before heading to the airport.
After arriving at the airport in KC, as we were checking in, we found out that while we’d go through Charlotte as normal, in JFK we had to claim our luggage, change terminals, and then check back in with Turkish Air (going back through security, etc.) before continuing with the international portion of our trip. One idiosyncracy, was that despite our tickets being printed at the same time, by the same agent… Jay’s Global Entry (TSA Pre-check) was printed on her tickets while Tim’s were not. In fact, Jay was in boarding group 6, while Tim was in boarding group 8 for both domestic flights and we couldn’t even board the planes together. (More on this foreshadowing info later…)
We’ve never had to claim luggage, leave the airport and re-enter on a transfer before, so it sounded quite daunting, but it had to be done. The flight to Charlotte was good, with nothing out of the ordinary… but lo’and’behold as we de-planed we found that we had come in at the same gate we had come back from Iceland at, years ago. Why on earty would we know/remember that particular gate you ask? Because it’s next to Phillips Seafood restaurant, who has some pretty mean crab cakes. (It is also memorable because when coming in from Iceland, we’d had crab cakes for breakfast.)
Anyway, we decided we needed crab cakes again before departing for Uzbekistan, and got in line for the restaurant. For those that travel, you likely have experienced the crushing business an airport restaurant has, often with no available tables as people dawdle and while away their time at the restaurant instead of at the terminal (i.e. not eating any longer, but keeping the old table occupied).
The 6 people in front of us all were taken in, and took the last of the available tables, leaving us to determine whether we really needed to get a crab cake or not. While we were deciding whether to continue to wait or not, a beautiful young lady with a big heart (spoiler alert, yes she’s a mid-westerner) sitting alone at a table for 4 asked if we wanted to sit with her. We did of course, and discovered that though she now lived in Virginia, she had grown up in Kansas (thus the spoiler earlier, and explaining why she was such a sweet young lady… midwestern roots).
Visiting with her was a great start to our trip, and a fantastic highlight of our outbound journey. (Ironically she received a text from her dad with a picture of one of his cows. What a funny and small world. Of course Tim whipped out his phone and shared a pic of Jay hand feeding the bull at the Collins’ farm.) Rachel, if you are reading this, thank you very much both for your kindness and hospitality in letting us eat lunch with you, as well as the lovely conversation. We know you’ll make Mykonos some day and enjoy it very much!
Our flight from Charlotte ended up leaving a bit late, causing us to fret slightly over making the JFK turn-around. However, the pilot welcoming us aboard announced that we’d make excellent time, and the flight scheduled for 1 hour and 55 minutes would take only 1 hour and 20 minutes, making us feel a little better.
Weeellll, a hair over 2 hours later, we were right back with an extremely tight, possibly un-makeable transfer at JFK. (Remember that business about waiting for luggage to de-plane, hit the carousel, claiming the luggage, changing terminals, checking in fresh with Turkish Air, clearing airport security anew, etc? We had roughly 50 minutes to get this all done before the flight was scheduled to LEAVE, not BOARD, but LEAVE.) It doesn’t help that besides the longer than planned (or announced) time, the taxi into the terminal took at least 3-1/2 hours. I swear we must have taxied up to Delaware, maybe through Boston, and then back to the terminal at JFK. Maaaaaaan do they taxi a long way at that airport.
Anyway, we just went ahead and hustled as quickly as we could to accomplish this, figuring the best we could do was the best we could do. We ended up “Amazing Racing – it” with one other couple from our Charlotte flight who were also going to Istanbul and were in the same boat. We made it to the Turkish Air ticketing counters right as they were “closing check-in”, given that the plane’s boarding time and come and gone and we were very close to the leaving time… We did make sure that the very nice Turkish Air agent had both of our Global Entry cards, figuring every advantage would help.
At security, a large flight crew was in front of us and getting all of security’s resources, such that we were again worried about getting through in a timely manner. Buuut, a quick supervisory adjustment on the flight crew opened up regular security, and the Global Entry paid off letting us actually “breeze” through security (at least as fast as you can go). As we were approaching the gate, Jay got a text that the status of the flight changed to ‘delayed’, that they hadn’t actually boarded yet, and boarding would be delayed. Evidently plane(s) (I guess more than just ours) were running late, so they delayed boarding to wait for these passengers… us… WHEW! Not gonna miss the flight.
Until we stood in line for 20 minutes, then boarding was pushed back again. Then 45 minutes later “we’re going to start boarding soon”. Anyway, after over an hour delay, while we didn’t miss our flight out of the US to Istanbul, our 2-hour layover in Istanbul (to transfer to our Tashkent flight) looked to be super iffy. YET. AGAIN. <sigh>
Which got us into Istanbul with less than an hour to change planes. Seredipty was at it’s best though, and we came in at Gate 14, with our outbound flight at Gate 11 (just round’the’corner). Easy peasy… especially since there were very few people so we could move quickly. Of course the reason there were very few people was of course because the nearly full flight had mostly completed boarding, and they were on their “last call”. Didn’t matter, last call or not, this was our last leg to Tashkent, and we’d made it on the flight. Life was good.
Until….. Tashkent. Tashkent’s passport control line was crazy busy and crazy slow. Really slow. Like so slow they moved foreigners over to the “Citizen’s only” line just to get everyone through. It took us over an hour to get through passport control. (We later learned that there were a lot of folks coming back from pilgramage, and that Tashkent’s small airport just can’t handle 4 jets landing at the same time.)
Anyway, as said above, we finally made it through. At least we didn’t have to worry about waiting for the baggage to be de-planed. BUT…
Were they? Find out next time on the continuation of Day-1 blog…
Just kidding.
No, of course we were left staring at a mostly empty rotating carousel. It hadn’t crossed our minds that when we landed in Istanbul, and had to sprint to Gates down to make the last call on our Tashkent flight… that while we did that in Amazing Race style (yea, yea, second referenced… so we LOVE that show, sue us) our bags miiiigghhhhttt not be able to do the same.
Serendipity once again smiled on us, and after much searching, we did find one bag that had been set off of the carousel (apparently it was cleared for the next flight), unfortunately that same searching couldn’t find the second bag. Enter Lost and Found, who tracked down our bag for us.. in Istanbul. Not sure how one bag had made the flight and the other didn’t… but there you are.
They gave us an official piece of paper, indicating that the bag would be expressed in by 8:00 am later that morning, and we’d have to come back for it. Keeping in mind over an hour through customs, at least 45 minutes working through baggage, we realized that our tranfer who was supposed to have picked us up after our flight was likely long gone, and that we’d have to hopefully get a taxi to our hotel. Tired and resigned, we finally headed out of the airport to look for a taxi.
Aaaannnnddddd Hat-Trick with the good fortune for the evening (okay, early morning). Our tour guide was still standing in the crowd holding up a “Gate 1” sign, which eagle-eye Jay quickly spotted. We had a ride to the hotel after all.
What a long initial travel session of ups and downs! Hopefully the rest of the trip is as exciting, but not this kind of exciting!
tl;dr
We left Kansas City at 1:50 pm Saturday afternoon. We arrived/checked-in to our hotel at roughly 3:20 am on Monday morning.