Thursday

2:40AM finally came around and we went to check in. Standing in the line Beloved asks me for her passport. “I don’t have it, you do.” There was an uneasy couple of minutes as she searched through her coat and the computer bag, but it was there. I knew it was but it’s always a startling thing when one can’t put ones hands right on the only document that can completely wreck all travel plans...


Check in goes well, the attendant asks if we would like to check our two bags all the way to our final destination. Yes, please. We will have to retrieve them when we go through passport control in Chicago, but they are tagged all the way to The Hometown and there is a possibility that we may avoid a baggage charge on this trip. It cost us $185 over the face price of the tickets to get three bags from Orlando Florida to Azerbaijan, so if this is the case it would be a pleasant surprise.

Upstairs and through passport control, another stamp in passport. We walk into the international departure side of the Tbilisi airport. There are several restaurants there, including “Burger Street,” which looks like a clone of Burger King. Guess what? The food tastes exactly like Burger King! Ha!


The time to depart comes and we walk down stairs to an outdoor exit and get on a bus. Our plane, an Airbus A320 is about a mile away! On board and under way, the trip is a blur. There is a food tray, bread and cold-cuts which are pretty good, but most of the three-hour journey to Warsaw Poland is spent trying to sleep. Fortunately we are successful in the attempt.

What we thought was going to be a couple hours in Warsaw turns out to be a five-and-a-half hour layover. Oh well. More sleep, a little food, and conversation with a young lady traveling home to California--she has been more than eight months in the region, teaching english and sightseeing. She and Beloved hit it right off and it is nice to have a third party to talk to and watch the bags when we want to stretch our legs.


By the way, there is no wifi in the Warsaw, Poland Airport.


Another by the way, the last time we flew through Warsaw Poland we ended up here for almost 20 hours. We were flying home from Helsinki, Finland, set to depart depart out of Warsaw. The Boeing 777 (a wonderful airplane) ingested several large birds upon it’s arrival, damaging one of the engines. The first report we got was that our flight at 1:00PM was delayed, there would be more information at 2:00. At 2:00 the announcement was that we were still delayed, there would be more information at 4:00. (At that time one other American that we had been sitting with said he was going to try his luck with another flight and left the gate. We would muscle it out, so we were a few hours late?) At 4:00 the announcement was that we were still delayed and the next announcement would come at 6:00 and we looked at each other apprehensively. What could we do at this point? At 6:00 the announcment came--first in Polish then in English--and we got a clue something was up when the 150 people sitting around in this gate all stormed the ticket counter. The flight was cancelled due to mechanical problems. We had already been sitting in the airport for more than eight hours already, so we were less than thrilled about the prospect of gathering up our stuff, going through passport control, getting on a bus and traveling into the city to be put up in one of Warsaw’s finest one-star hotels. But that’s what we did. I have used the phrase several times about that trip, “We spent a week in Warsaw one night...”