Arrived in Bulgaria... At Long Last!

Today was quite a long day, I must say.

Last night, I stayed up relatively late getting last minute packing and preparation done for our family's trip to Bulgaria, and this morning we all were out the door and on the bus at 6:30.

To get to our destination, we had many legs of our journey, as there was no direct bus to where we needed to go.

First we took a bus to the nearest city, from where we were to catch a bus to another big city, and from there, catch a 3 hour bus ride to the airport.

Only, despite leaving the house at 6:30, there already was traffic on the way into the city, and we missed the bus we needed to take to the next city. Because of that, we ended up taking the later bus, which meant that we missed the long bus that would take us to the airport, and since that bus only ran every hour and a half, we wouldn't get to the airport 3+ hours before our flight, as I'd intended.

I was so nervous what would happen, running through all these scenarios in my head what would happen if we missed our flight, because of the chain of events and us coming to the airport late, but fortunately it was a small and non busy airport and we breezed through security and arrived at our gate with plenty of time to spare, enough time for me to even write a blog post!

And then, of course, the flight was delayed. Not too much, but enough to get my kids to ask me a million questions about why we weren't leaving just yet.

Lee was my only kid who'd ever been on a plane, ever even been through security at the airport, so the kids were all pretty excited, to see planes up close, and even the normal run of the mill airport things for me were really awesome for them.

The kids, especially the girls, were really excited by takeoff, and every single thing that happened on the plane was new and exciting.

Though of course the fun wears off and my kids ended up being bored on the plane and we had a bunch of "are we there yet"s, but finally, we arrived.

While still going through passport control, I looked to see which grocery stores would still be open, especially since we arrived in Bulgaria late because of our delay, and found one that was open until 10 pm, which meant we could get there if we didn't dally. Shopping needed to be done tonight because I brought food for today, thinking I overpacked, but I underestimated how much my kids would devour and I needed groceries pronto. For that reason, even though I didn't have so much battery left on my cell phone, I left to Lidl, intending to shop, and hopefully buy a car cell phone charger for my phone.

Only Lidl had no chargers and I had very little battery on my phone, and still needed to find my way to our AirBnB apartment. We were at 2 percent battery and hoping for the best, that we'd make it to the apartment while the battery still lasted. Someone pointed us in the direction of a gas station that was supposed to be open and selling things like that, but we couldn't find it, and didn't want to waste battery life. We drove and prayed and prayed and drove and finally got really close but then the phone was nearly dead. We saw some people standing around on the road and asked them if they had a car phone charger we could borrow, explaining our predicament, and fortunately they did. We parked near them and exactly then my phone died, so it was perfect timing. After a few minutes charging, we gave back the charger and went on our way, finding the airbnb, which is just gorgeous.

The kids went to bed, and I'm just preparing for tomorrow, making breakfast and lunch to bring along with us, and I wanted to update you all.

This really was a tiring day. So much could have gone wrong, but fortunately, even with all the stress, it worked out in the end just all right.