Day ONE--Travel Day

Day one:

We had plenty of time to get to the airport. We left from McDonald’s in Rhinelander at 6:06am on Friday, and were taking the 494 Exit at 10:01am. We parked at the hotel (Comfort Inn in Bloomington) and were able to catch the 10:30am Shuttle to the airport. All 16 of us fit on one shuttle bus.

We made it through security just fine, although most kids were told to combine all their toiletries into ONE quart size bag.. his got some kids a little stressed out. All kids swiped their passport at the Kiosk to get their boarding pass. This was a learning experience for them and they all did fine. Although we were able to chose our seats at that point, it was too big of a group to try to rearrange.

We made it through security with just three people being stopped to be checked more thoroughly., Jackie Boyer (my mom) with a replaced hip, Kjersten Olson, who didn’t take her laptop out of it’s case, and Bekah Forsyth because she had too many zip-lock bags.

We ate lunch at the food court just past security at the Minneapolis airport. Next we all headed down to gate E16 where we had plenty of time to freshen-up, buy books, and relax before boarding for our Texas flight.

That flight was 2.5 hours and we were served some sodas. Most of the kids were spread-out throughout the cabin, but seemed to do just fine either sleeping, reading (The Hunger Games was a big hit), or visiting with the people next to them. Hailey, Peyton, and Brig all had to check their big suitcase, as they were told it was too big.

After landing we easily found our next gate, met my mom Jackie, and boarded within one hour of landing in Dallas, TX. This flight was huge. We met another EF group in the lobby and realized it might be easy to switch seats with some of them as we seemed to be assigned all in the same area. This worked out great on our big plane with a row of 5 down the middle and double seats on each side. There were some movies shown on the flight that the kids were able to use their ear-phones to watch, but most kids slept or read. We left TX at 5:30pm and arrived in Madrid at 10:30am. Kjersten and Hannah now were asked to check a bag too. This created a problem at landing as they gave us the wrong gate number for pick-up. After finding the right baggage claim, we were missing one of our 5 bags, it was Hailey’s. So, after reporting the bag missing, we met our EF Tour Director, Amaya. She gave the luggage claim people her sell phone and we were off.