Our last morning in Portugal started with two alarms going off at 6:00 a.m., which we immediately snoozed until 6:30. It felt less like waking up and more like admitting defeat.
We had arranged private transport to the airport, and thank goodness we did. Our driver was a very nice lady who spent part of the ride halfway trying to convince us to move to Portugal. After two weeks there, this was not the hardest sales pitch in the world to sit through.
Our flight was scheduled to leave at 12:20. We dropped our bags at 9:07 and made it through security around 9:30, which made us feel like we were doing great.
Then we found the passport line.
It was one of the longest, most chaotic lines we have ever been in. An hour and a half across what felt like the entire airport. It was Vatican-level long. The kind of line where you keep turning corners and hoping you are near the end, only to discover a whole new civilization of people waiting ahead of you.
A charismatic guy jumped the line and joined a group of women behind us. Over the course of the next hour and a half, they all got to know each other very well. He was going through a divorce and had been separated for 15 years. One of the women had been separated for five. We now know way too much about all of their lives. Red flags everywhere.
At one point, an older couple came up and said they had been sent to a different line, but they did not have the correct passports and asked if they could jump in with us. We did not condemn or condone. We were just trying to survive the line.
But the group behind us, who had just let the walking red flag join them so they could flirt for an hour, got mad at the older couple and told them to get behind him.
Talk about a double standard.
Aaron also got cut in the last 10 minutes of the line. Honestly, it was impressive. We were in stanchions. We still do not know where the guy came from or how he got there. He was apologetic, and boarding for his flight started in 15 minutes. Sometimes you gotta do what you gotta do.
We finally made it through customs and onto the plane, where we slept when we could and read or blocked out the passage of time when we could not. The flight was a little delayed getting off the ground, but not by much, and it ended up being okay because our connecting flight was delayed significantly anyway.
Once we got to Washington and made it through customs, we realized we had forgotten to throw away the fruit we had grabbed from the hotel just in case we got hungry.
We fessed up at immigration, and Kaylea’s passport got locked into a box along with a slip explaining our mistake. Then we had to go to an immigration officer, who confiscated our fruit and unlocked the box so we could pick up our bags.
So if anyone is wondering whether the government takes undeclared hotel fruit seriously, the answer is yes.
As mentioned earlier, our connecting flight was pretty delayed, so once again we slept when we could. By this point, the day had become less of a travel day and more of a 24 hour endurance gauntlet.
Eventually, we made it home. Now we're faced with a million piles of laundry and a small road trip to go pick up Marvyn.
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