Selamet Tahun Baru/Happy New Year!

We’re back! It has been a month since our last posting. We traveled to the US for Christmas and back during that month. Our first posting will be about Christmas, traveling, etc..

The trip to the US took a total of 35 hours. Only the last leg of our trip had a delay so we arrived an hour or two later than originally scheduled. It kept our greeters up late but we’re glad they waited for us —they had our winter coats!!!!! We’d shipped them to my mom before we left the US so we’d have them when we needed them. The good news? It wasn’t really terribly cold. Highs the first few days of our visit were in the 40s and 50s. However, when you compare it to the 90s we were used to, it was still a large swing.

We had a lovely Christmas and the family had decided to have a “balled and bagged” tree this year to make it an extra special Christmas. A few days after Christmas we planted it on their property. The hole had to be pre-dug in case the ground froze by Christmas, so that was done just after Thanksgiving I believe. The planting went well and in just a few years there will be a very nice spruce tree in the back yard.

A lot of our time in NY was spent obtaining things we wanted to bring back with us. We worked on yet another puzzle- a beautiful one with different eastern US birds on a rustic Adirondack chair in the snow. Yes, a puzzle with snow isn’t the easiest! Speaking of snow, we traveled to Boston to visit brother Dick and it began snowing.

We had promised our driver Oky that we would build a snowman in his honor should it snow while we were in the US. It hadn’t snowed the entire time we’d been back so we tried to build a snowman out of this fresh snowfall. It was the driest snow I think I’ve ever seen and it contained tiny ice pellets as well. This stuff just would not pack.  Undeterred by the pack of “packability”, we tried to build a snowman flat on the driveway by pushing snow together with a shovel, but it ended up looking like a crime scene of some sort.  Fortunately, soon it snowed again. This time we were dealing with slush. We managed to build a snowman of small stature using slush. Not easy but we did it! My mom had purchased a “snowman kit” consisting of a felt hat and scarf, plastic “coal” buttons, eyes and mouth pieces and a plastic “carrot” nose.  It was perfect except the nose was much too large for our diminutive snowman so we used a baby carrot instead.

It was so great to spend time with the family but sadly it came to an end and we had to start the trip back home.

The trip back did not go as planned. You may remember I mentioned that on arrival the temperatures were quite mild. Towards the end of our visit the temperatures were anything but mild. The morning we left the mercury dipped to -15F.  This thermometer was right against the house so it only registered a balmy -10F.

For our flight back, our originating flight had been sitting on the tarmac since late the afternoon the day before. They use auxiliary heating units (AHEs) to keep the fuel warm on the plane. There is even someone who is supposed to be checking on the units. Somewhere the system failed and the fuel was not warmed so they couldn’t start the plane. They tried every AHE they could find. All of the fuel had jelled. They eventually took an AHE to a heated building for a while to warm it so its fuel could warm up and then they brought it back. Finally the plane got started. They’d boarded us, started to deplane us, canceled the deplaning, fully deplaned us and once they finally got the plane going, re-boarded us. We did the de-icing thing and finally we were off. We were 1.5 hours late leaving.

 

We had a long layover in Chicago so still managed to get to the new gate just prior to boarding. Then, uh, oh, someone forgot to schedule fuel delivery and de-icing for the plane so we were delayed AGAIN. Then it started snowing. With all the delays we had to de-ice two times which put us even further behind. We spent a lot of time just sitting at the gate waiting. I kept busy taking pictures of the de-icing machines, the snow, the parade of snowplows heading out to clear the runways, etc. 

Ultimately we left 2 hours and 50 minutes late out of Chicago—late enough we missed our connection in Tokyo. Our connection in Tokyo was only 1 hour 40 minutes. We had to spend the night in Tokyo and continued on the last leg of our journey the following morning. We actually arrived Saturday Jan 10 at 6:30 pm instead of our original arrival time of Friday January 9, 11:50 pm. Total travel time: 49 hrs. Yikes.

There was one other “bug” in our travels. We’d purchased US SIM cards for our phones while in the US. They worked fine in the US but neither of the US SIM cards worked in Tokyo and neither did our Indonesian SIM cards.  We’re working on figuring out the problem. We were dependent on WiFi and WhatsApp to get information back and forth with our driver about the change in our travel.

IMPORTANT NOTE: A human being can withstand a 100 degree temperature change in a short period of time and not burst into flame!

    Departure temperature: -15F, arrival temperature 90F. Delta? 105 degrees. It felt so hot!

I'm catching up on  posts, I promise. More posts coming very soon!