We had an hour drive to Jacksonville Airport, a short flight to Atlanta, 40 minutes at Atlanta Airport before our 5 hour flight to Los Angeles. We had also chosen to fly on the busiest travel day in the US calendar, the day before Thanksgiving, plus storms were forecast.
We had 5 bags, 2 car seats, 1 pram, hand luggage, 2 children and 1 toy elephant. To say we weren’t looking forward to it was an understatement.However all went relatively smooth, except for the dash at Atlanta Airport to catch the next plane and Chloe being a little overtired and restless for the first 3 hours on the flight to LA. She was so worked up, she ended up being sick, luckily the seats were vinyl. For a child that rarely throws up, it certainly came as a surprise and gave me even more reason to dread the flight home to Australia in less than a week! She finally fell asleep for the last 2 hours – thank god.
On arriving at LAX, we walked a million miles to the baggage claim. Richard miraculously piled most of our luggage on one trolley, not sure if he could see over the top, while I struggled with the rest of the hand luggage, one car seat and kids. We only waited 10 minutes for a taxi, which was mainly due to waiting for one that was big enough for all our stuff. It was about 7.30pm LA time and we envisaged a long bottlenecked drive to Santa Monica. But the taxi driver was fantastic and we avoided the freeways and arrived at the house within 30 minutes. We all fell into bed at 9pm LA time which was midnight for us still on Florida time – a big day for everyone.
