Date Added
Friday, July 8th, 2011
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Journey to Mauritius
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When we booked our Mauritius trip, I was very excited. But as they departure day loomed, I was nervous and a little stressed (to be fair, we did have jessie’s 4th birthday party the day before we left. All the organising contributed to my stress levels).
To calm my nerves and try to lighten my thoughts, I imagined all the people seeing us arrive at the airport. 1 granny, 2 parents, 3 little sprogs, piles of bags. I imagined the looks of terror and horror on their faces. I pictured their eyes rolled heaven-ward and lips silently praying that we weren’t on their flight. I’m sure you can tell, I really enjoyed this thought process! It helped me tremendously! (Try it for yourself, its highly amusing)
After the party, I packed furiously. I sorted and counted, checked and re-checked. Then after having the clothes ready, I threw in extras just-in-case. Yet when it came to packing for myself, I just threw clothes into a bag. No counting, no real sorting. More of a I-hope-I-have-enough strategy 
Once the everything was packed, we had 10 pieces of luggage. This included carry-ons, but not my nappy/hand bag. B and I were in slight shock, but we laughed it off.
We had a very early start and had the kids up and ready by 6:15. My dad picked us up, we loaded up the car and off we went. (As an aside, how on earth people are up and about in the freezing early mornings, I do not know!) The car was chock-a-block. Dad could barely see out the rear window!
We arrived at CT International and checked-in. Interestingly we were around 40kgs under our limit. I was so impressed by that! We went through, had a snack, watched the sunrise and waited for boarding. Jack was so excited to be going on an “airplane”. It was incredibly cute!
When the time came for boarding, we had to keep a handle on Jack. He wanted to charge on ahead and get to the plane. We were all in a row: Jack, B, Kyla with me, jessie, granny. Jack figured out straight away how to buckle his seatbelt! We were so impressed.
I fed Kyla through take-off and everyone was hundreds! We had breakfast, coloured in, watched the in-flight “entertainment” and chatted. I did have to change Jack’s nappy on the flight. That was rather interesting! I changed him with his legs straight-up against the wall in the toilet. Was rather funny!
The flight was easy. We landed with a huge bump in JHB! Kids handled it well, granny not so much. we had checked our baggage through, so we just needed to make our way across the airport to departures and then the loooooong hike to international departures and to our gate. I walked through the airport barefoot. I got lots of funny stares and questions, but I’m used to it. I hardly ever wear shoes! And the shoes I’d taken on the flight were hurting me. So rather than hurting, I took them off.
We had 2.5hours from landing until our next flight. Plenty of time…
We managed to find a short queue for passport control. The main passport control was super busy, insanely busy! We were done within 5 minutes. It was awesome. The walk to our gate took us 20minutes!! That’s excluding the potty breaks along the way. We only waited for about 25minutes before boarding our flight. Those 2.5 hours flew by!
We knew a couple of people on the flight, I think they were dreading flying with our brood . The flight was rather bumpy. Granny didn’t take too well. We had a nice meal and thanks to a strong tail wind, the flight was only 3.5 hours. The sprogs were stars! Kyla slept for 2 hours which really helped. The other 2 played and coloured, watched a little of Tangled. And then it was landing time. No crying, no moaning, just awesomely behaved sprogs! People commented when passing us, that our kids were amazing. Who am I to argue?
Next chapter… Mauritus by dark