Good god, what a trip back. Pretty much everything that could go wrong went wrong, except for the actually missing the plane part.  First we had a hard time to find the right place to go through passport control on Schiphol, I'm not quite sure why they insist on sending people on a wild goose chase, but oh well. Then the Lufthansa people decided they needed additional identification because my passport is still in my maiden name. Funny thing is that no one else on both ways seemed to care about that. Gave them my green card and that was ok. Got into Frankfurt, that went ok, except that they didn't know what gate our plane to Chicago would be leaving from, that was pretty much a guessing game. More security and found our way to the United terminal eventually.

Flight to Chicago was pretty much uneventful, except for the lack of tv screens to every seat. Didn't like that at all, because the main screen was all the way on the other side of the cabin and we were as far to the back as possible(Jason wanted to be near the bathrooms). Main meal was not very good, but they made it up with the snack meal(was very good) near the end of the flight.

So, and that's when we arrived on O'Hare. Which is where the mess started. First, passport control took forever, it seemed that every US citizen had decided to enter the US through Chicago. Usually the US citizen line is much smaller than the non-US citizen line, but not this time and not by a mile. Next was picking up the suitcases and for God's sake why do they insist on people doing that? I don't see any safety benefits from it at all. Pick up bags, go through customs, who doesn't give a crap and let every one go through without so much a look at your luggage and give it back to United. Really confused about this. Anywho, that of course took forever as well. Line through Customs was long, and not helped by people who didn't know where the line started and tried to cut in line. Gave bags back to the United people, went on the trolley/mono rail thing they have there and got to yet another security check. Now I've been to Disneyland Paris and I've seen lines, the security lines were about the same size of Space Mountain. We asked one of those security people if they could let us go through without waiting because at that time our next flight was already boarding and should take off in about 25 minutes. She didn't like it, pretty much blamed us for being late for boarding(uuuuuh, whaaa??) but let us cut to the front of the line anyway. Now, the only thing going our way there was that the plane to Des Moines had trouble with the starting motors for take off/air co unit and had to be started with a machine, so it had gotten delayed over the day. At that point it was almost 40 minutes. That was our luck because if the plane had left on time we would have missed it.

We left Amsterdam at 9:40 CET(we left my parents house at 7 CET) and arrived in Des Moines around 7:30 C, back in Ottumwa a little after 9:30 C. That was one loooong day.

The weather has treated us very well in Holland, my sister looked great and her wedding dress was gorgeous. The wedding party afterward was great too. We're happy to be back at home and our kitties seem to be happy that we're back as well.

Pictures will probably follow soon.