Day 63: The Long Journey Home

It took many, many hours, but we made it!

The alarms went off at 5am so we could give ourselves a little bit to finish getting together both ourselves and our belongings. Peter and Alicia gave us hugs goodbye before we hopped in the car with Alina at 6 to go to Düsseldorf Airport. Given the news stories over the summer, I was curious to see how our time would be spent getting home. We had to get a connecting flight from Düsseldorf to Heathrow, and then we caught out flight to Philadelphia.

We got to Düsseldorf about 20 minutes to 7, which was nice. Then, we waited about an hour and a half before the British Airways desk actually opened so we could check our bags. It was kind of annoying to have to have waited that long, but once they opened, it didn’t take long, which was nice. We then headed to security, which only took 20 minutes (I was shook!). We still hadn’t eaten, but Brandon wanted to get to the gate first so we knew where to go. I agreed that made sense. We walked past a bunch of food places, went through Passport Control, and then made it to our gate. The caveat, we found, was that once you get to gates at Düsseldorf…there’s not really a feasible way to get back to ANY of the food places without having to go back through Passport Control. Lesson learned *shrugs*!

We boarded our flight to Heathrow, which provided a nice granola bar to tide us over. The flight itself was uneventful and quick! At Heathrow, we *unfortunately* had to go through security a second time before going to our connecting gate. That took about 45 minutes, which again, isn’t terrible. The nice thing about going through security at both airports was that we didn’t have to take our shoes off! It’s a little thing, but I enjoyed it tremendously :) Cleared for takeoff, we found a Korean noodle place to get some lunch before we went to our gate to fly to Philly. It was VERY good, and I don’t think that was just because I was starving lol. We had to take a tram to our gate, and we got there shortly before they started the boarding process, so our timing was great!

The flight to Philadelphia was going to be about 7.5 hours. It passed slowly, I felt, despite watching a few movies and listening to some music. They gave us SO MUCH FOOD during that flight, though. We got a small bag of sour cream & chive pretzels to start, then there was a full blown meal (I had chicken; Brandon got stuck with the vegetarian option because that’s all that was left), some cookies, a savory pastry thing, and multiple rounds of beverages. It was wild!

We landed on time around 4:30 pm local time in Philadelphia and began the (not wildly lengthy) process of getting through customs. Word to the wise, Philadelphia now has Automatic Passport Control machines kiosks that make the process a breeze! It took 5 minutes, if that, and then we found our bags (which were some of the first off the plane!), gave the DHS man our customs slips from the kiosk, and then we only had to wait another 5 minutes for my parents to come pick us up!

We went to dinner at one of our favorite diners before heading to their house and going through some of our souvenirs. Then, the exhaustion hit and it was time to crash. Souls and bellies full, we fell asleep pretty quick!

I thank you once again for following along on this adventure with us! I’ll have other posts related to it as time passes to reflect, but for now, enjoy this last round of photos :)