Goodbye, Hello

I don't know why you say hello, I say goodbye

Amma’s Corner with the good news:

We will never forget the way the entire Courtyard Marriott Madurai team embraced our family as one of their own. Despite whatever was (or wasn’t) happening outside of the walls of the hotel, every single person within made sure we were cared for and every need was met. I’m sure it helped that we had pretty much the same schedule 80% of the time we were there!

You Get Nothing. You Lose. Good Day Sir. They just wouldn’t let me say goodbye. The passport office managed to pull the football away one last time before finally letting us out of the city.

Me vs. Passport Office from left: June 14, June 15, June 16

Having received notification that the passport was being printed on Wednesday afternoon, I foolishly got my hopes up that it would be laminated and dispatched via courier that same day for pickup the next day. After 57 refreshes of the online passport status tracking website it was clear that wasn’t happening. We finally got the call the next day that it was being dispatched on Thursday and that we could pick up the passport and all other documents on Friday, which meant officially checking out of the hotel and leaving Madurai on Saturday. Of course, that 24 hours cost us about 72 more hours in India, as we lost the weekend (and Juneteenth) for any further movement in Delhi. We are finally rebooked on a flight leaving Delhi late Friday night and are scheduled to finally be back in Chicago late morning Saturday, June 24th. We owe a lot of people thanks for all of the calls made and strings pulled to the Passport Office. I hope each of you reading know how much we’ve appreciated the help. I know that being home doesn’t magically make everything easier, but I think we’re all ready to take on those challenges in more familiar confines and with a little more control of our surroundings.

Just 6 more months of this problem. Anika did great on her first flight! We had a 3 hour direct flight from Madurai to Delhi as a nice little test run for the 15 hour flight to Newark, NJ we having coming later this week. 5 is a great number for “family members” but not a great number for “traveling together on a plane”. That’ll be a problem we’ll have to figure out later. In the meantime, we’ll need to settle on the optimal seating order for the 5 of us in 4 seats with an increasingly curious/aware/obstinate Ayana and increasingly annoyed/exasperated/independent Akila. For it being the first flight, I was pretty pleased. No major meltdowns from anyone and we didn’t lose anything on the plane!

Happy Father’s Day. I feel like I have a limited window of time between when Anika gets comfortable enough to be held by me while Nishi is still in sight and when Akila becomes too cool to stand for a picture next to her dork of a dad with #radjokes. Happy Father’s Day!