luggage

While I normally like to travel light, moving to New Zealand like turtles, with nothing more than our homes on our backs, made for some serious planning.

We flew from Salt Lake to Long Beach, then spent a day with Aimee, Andrew and their families.
Neither Jet Blue nor Air New Zealand offered sky cab service. So we had to lug everything all the way inside the airport. We made quite a spectacle.

Getting through security much longer, but once people saw us in line they usually would aviod lining up behind us.

Due to the fact that Lonnie's company was paying for the tickets we decided to get seats for both the twins. Even though technically they can still fly as lap children we didn't think that 13 hours with a baby on each of our laps would be a very wise choice. We also decided to bring the babies' car seat on the plane. I'm so glad we did this, it kept them in a familiar and comfortable seat and also really helped them to sleep. Thankfully both flights also had individual screens which allowed the babies to remain entertained. The Air New Zealand flight was especially nice. There was a wide selection of movies for kids and Max and Maya watched Jungle Book, Cars and Winnie the Pooh. The flight staff was very accommodating and kind. With a dark red-eye flight and their car seats the babies slept the majority of the 13 hours in the air. If it weren't for the screaming child in from of us and the woman behind us who kept accidentally turning on her over head light we would have all gotten a full night's sleep.

Here we are after arriving at the Long Beach airport.



One of the best travel helps was the Traveling Toddler strap (Thank you, Ann) that allowed us to attach the car seats, along with the babies, onto our roller bags. I would highly recommend these to anyone traveling with a toddler and a car seat.