Our Journey Home

All together it takes about 24 hours to get home from Russia. We woke up at 2:30 am in Russia, upon waking for some reason I had this feeling we had told the translator the wrong airport. The driver was to be picking us up at 3:20. I logged onto the computer and sure enough, we had. So Gary looked it up online and it said it was 50 miles away, eeek!!! The driver that was picking us up spoke no English, so Gary just looked up the name of the airport in Russian and wrote it down. The driver didn't seem panicked, and we made it in plenty of time.
Our facilitator had warned us that passport control may want to look at her birth certificate. Well when we approached the counter and handed the lady our passports she had the meanest smirk on her face. She stood there and looked at all of our paperwork. She spoke no English and there were was noone working who spoke English! She was claiming our name was not matching on something. I would love to give her the benefit of the doubt, but to be totally honest she was enjoying messing with us. She called several others over, and someone walked off with the original of Anastasia's birth certificate and adoption certificate!!! They left us standing there for another 30 minutes while they "checked on something" Then she smirked as she gave us back all of our documents and said "no probems"
Our first 2 flights were not bad, the second was 9 hours, so very long, but not too bad. Our third flight was delayed as we were about to take off, but only by about 45 minutes.
When we landed our second flight we had to go through customs at Charlotte, where we were to give them a sealed envelope that had paperwork from the Amercian Embassy in Russia. Well, when we got to customs, and handed them our number that passport control gave us,they barked at us to go sit in the office and someone would be there to help us. Well it was basically a waiting room with all the passport "invalids" We were scared we were going to miss our next flight. So Gary went and asked if they had flight info, and they told him he would have to call the airline himself, and since there were no cellphones allowed in customs that he would have to wait. They were very rude. At that point I was very irritated. Not only were they really rude, but my husband serves this country, we are not criminals we are just trying to get our daughter home. Well eventually a very nice man came and got us and gave us permission to go on, and they didn't search our bags, which was good because we didn't have much time to get to our next flight.
We arrived home to a house full of wonderful friends!! It was a huge surprise. They had decorated, stocked my fridge, mowwed our grass, and taken care of our home and children. Anastasia was overjoyed by all the pink decorations and friends and brothers to greet her, she was in heaven! I was competely surprised by the welcome home party, it was very touching.