Pre-Nepal Adventures

On Friday, January 2nd, Kimber, Melody, Jackie, and I were all set to travel to Nepal the next day. Our flight was at 950pm and we were set to leave Baltimore for Dulles at 530pm. However, it was not in the cards for us to be departing the US at 950pm on January 3rd.

My original plan was to sleep in late so as to stay up during the entire flight and sleep during our 14 hours layover in Abu Dhabi to be on a good sleep schedule for our arrival in Nepal. A knock on my door by Melody that morning and a quick "Can you come outside? Our flight got changed" jolted me out of bed much earlier than I would have liked. Jackie had received an email saying out 950pm flight got pushed to depart at 520am instead. Apparently the airport in Abu Dhabi had shut down for a bit due to heavy fog and it had thrown all the flight times off. This didn't affect our plans too much since now we had more time to pack so we called our shuttle service to change our pickup time, however they were completely booked so we cancelled our van and Michael, our kind TA, offered to rent a zipvan and drive us to the airport at 1am. With that being settled, Melody and I spent more time relaxing, hitting the gym, and watching TV to kill the extra hours we suddenly found on hand.

During my mini Friends marathon around 930pm, my phone buzzed with an email from Jackie. Now the last time I had received an email from Jackie it was forwarded message from the airline saying our flight time had changed. With that precedent set I was expecting to open the email to find out that our flight got pushed to even later. I was only half-right; our flight time had changed but was now set to depart at 1230am, 5 hours sooner than we were expecting. After a flurry of phone calls and text messages, we decided we would leave ASAP to head to Dulles to try to check in (hopefully) in time. 

After that having been decided, Melody ran to the bathroom to take the shower she had intended to take right before heading to the airport at 1am and I ran to my room to finish packing the electronics and toiletries that I was going to leisurely pack around 11pm. We quickly got our luggage together and piled it into the zipvan as the rain that had been on and off throughout the day continued in a steady downpour.

Michael raced us to Dulles in a quick 1 hour and we hustled to the Etihad counter at 1115pm. Luckily no one was in line and we were able to check in quickly. We asked the man at the counter if he would be able to call the gate to let them know we were on our way but he reassured us that there was no way the plane would be leaving at 1230am as planned because it had not even landed yet. Even so, we rushed to security and, again, were met with no lines and made it through to our gate. 

Our nice empty flight

True to his word, the flight did not start boarding until 1245am and so we found that we could have actually taken our time packing (which would have helped as I ended up forgetting my shoes) and leaving for the airport. In the end I think all four of us would agree that the rush was worth the tension because with all the plane time changes, there ended up being only around 20 people on our flight, meaning we all got to lay down and go to sleep. All four of us ended up sleeping for almost the entire 12 hours of our flight.

We arrived in Abu Dhabi very refreshed and had 11 hours to kill. Due to the fog, there were a lot of travelers wandering around the airport also trying to kill time. Some had even been stranded in the airport for days and we were lucky that our next flight was still scheduled to leave at the expected time. Due to all the delays, we were also able to get dinner and breakfast vouchers as well as a hotel voucher. After some discussion though we decided not to check into the hotel because it was about 30 minutes away from the airport and we would need to pay for transportation there and back. We also didn't feel like sleeping much more so we decided to pass our time in the airport.

Somehow between freshening up in the bathroom (Jackie repurposed some ziploc bags into shower shoes and a scarf into a towel to use one of the free showers in the bathroom), eating dinner, reading, napping, talking, eating breakfast, wandering around the airport, we managed to make the 11 hour layover fly by and were soon boarding our next flight to Nepal, which was a short 3.5 hours. After an uneventful flight (it was unfortunately completely full), we found ourselves at the Kathmandu airport and waited about 2 hours for our luggage to come in. We hailed a taxi and arrived at the Kathmandu Guest House (heretofore referred to as KGH) to interrupt Allie and Wes playing a romantic, candlelit game of cards. After a quick reunion and dinner, we all went upstairs exhausted and eager to start our adventures in Kathmandu!