So it Begins - The Flight to South Africa

SO IT BEGINS - The Flight(s) to South Africa

Posted by Brian for Mark

After getting 1.5 hours of sleep on Wednesday night (6/23 - which also happens to be our 16th wedding anniversary - we had a 13 minute lunch to celibrate before we signed our Last Will and Testiment - for real!) we left the house at 4:30 a.m. to catch our flight to Atlanta. Getting everything together for the Loskop Mini World Cup we are running here in South Africa felt like we were preparing for an Everest expedition. Dianne had three very large plastic shipping crates which we filled with items for the mini cup (thanks to Soccer West for the great discount on the World Cup balls and practice vests!). It was a relief to finally get on the plane and not have to do anything. To make things even better, our Delta flight had TV screens on the back of every headrest with live (and free!) access to ESPN and ESPN2! I have to give credit to my 11 year old son Kekoa - it took him about five minutes after take off to have figured this out and have the Italy/Slovakia and New Zealand/Paraguay games on adjoining headrests. Within a few minutes most Kekoa's entire section was watching World Cup soccer! It felt so good to kick back and watch two games at the same time with nothing to do. We were pulling for a Netherlands/Italy Round of 16 game, as we have tickets for both R16 games that Groups E and F roll into, but Italy failed to hold up its end of the bargain. Netherlands/Slovakia and Paraguay/Japan. I guess these -pairings are proof as to why they need to play the games.
The first leg of the flight from Seattle to Atlanta went pretty quickly, and before we knew it, we were off on our 17 hour direct flight from Atlanta to Joburg. The three boys were fantastic the entire way, with all of us pretty much alternating between being up for two hours and sleeping for two hours. Unfortunately the live TV feature was not enabled, so we missed the Portugal/Brasil game - the sacrifices one has to make when traveling to the World Cup!
We landed just a little late and sailed through customs and baggage claim. The rental car was another matter - while Avis was really slow in processing us, the real trick was getting 10 pieces of luggage (including the three large tournament crates) and seven people into two Toyota Corollas. OK, the really really tricky part was driving the full ten minutes from the airport to the Airport Inn Bed and Breakfast. The whole right hand drive thing is much worse than we thought it would be, and we were thinking it would be pretty bad. Windsheild wipers turned on and off ten times or so (instead of the turn signals), driving down wrong sider of thre road (multiple times), and one full on locked breaks on the highway later, and we were there.

TICKET TIME

We landed just a little late and sailed through customs and baggage claim. Then there was the big moment - getting our tickets from the FIFA kiosk at the airport. The whole ticket process is a bit nerve wracking, as we obtained (and paid for) most of our tickets in the initial FIFA lottery in March of 2009. Do they send the winners the tickets they paid for? NO! You have to pick them up in South Africa by inserting you credit card into a machine. So, we spent thousands of dollars over a year ago, find the kiosks in the airport, and stick our cards in - and the machines indicate they are "Having Difficulty" reading my card and Brian's card (Dianne's went through right away). After a tense minute or two of repeatedly putting our cards in different machines, bang, our games pop up on the screen and start printing out - including the seven USA/Ghana R16 tickets I snagged on the FIFA website at 12:30 a.m. in the morning on Thursday, just a few hours before leaving for SeaTac.