Leaving the USA
01/27/2023 AD departed
We woke up at 3:00 am to give ourselves plenty of time to make our flight out of the country.
Once we got everybody up, dressed, and loaded into the car, we first had to drive from San Diego to LAX arriving during rush hour. We were fortunate that we hit no major delays — our major slowdown was due to a rest stop to change diapers.
Once we arrived we had to get the suitcases out of the car top carrier, and remove it from the top of the car.
Simultaneously, we had to load and tape up two boxes each containing a car seat, a booster seat, some blankets, and other odds and ends.
Of course, all of this was happening at the curbside passenger drop off zone at one of the busiest airports in the world.
Meanwhile, we had to find the check-in counter, hold our place in line, and shuttle the five fully packed bags, two boxes, and one acoustic guitar from the curb to the counter as there were no skycaps handling our airline!
I wish we had more photos of this operation because it was really something to see, but we were all busy.
Check in went fairly smoothly though — all of our bags made the weight limit, and our tickets and travel documents were all in order. We did have to run the guitar over to a special "oversize counter," but that only took an extra five minutes.
Now that we were checked in and said our goodbyes to John, we had about 3 hours before flight time.
We didn't want to rus right through TSA though, because we were certain they would force us to discard our milk, and we were a bit worried that they may take the Dramamine we wanted to give the kids to calm them down.
Furthermore, I felt it would be nicer to wait outside as long as possible rather than being stuck at the gate waiting to board.
Once we did get on board we were facing a 13.5 hour first leg to Seoul, Korea.
Lattitude: 33.1192° N
Longitude: 117.0864° W
Region: North America
Modern Day United States
