Departure Day

After handling the logistics, and saying our final farewell through well worn cloth masks, the time for our departure finally came. We were set for a direct flight, which we wanted, to limit the total number of people we came across in the airport and on the plan for pandemic reasons. But that direct flight did mean the proposition of a daunting flight ahead of us. 

We woke up the morning (night) of our flight at 1am and got picked up by drivers from the school. We bundled up H in his jammies still and got in the car with our five suitcases containing all of our possessions. When we got to the airport, we checked everything in and got ourselves ready to roll. I was super nervous about a lot of things but I think I was most nervous about getting warm in the airport lacking A/C and showing temperature, or gettin a cough at the wrong time and being denied access to the plane for fear of having COVID. We were all in. There was no where to go back to. If something went wrong, we didn't have a home anymore to return to. But luckily, these were just anxiety fueled thoughts going through our heads. We got through check in and security just fine and our flight took off on time at 5:30am. 

Another concern I had, but knew I had no control over, was how H would do on the flight. He is at a stage (just shy of 2) now where he is extremely active. He runs, jumps, swims, climbs, and does almost everything he wants to physically now. To restrain him from any of this is an almost sure fire guarantee of toddler tantrum fit. We were asking him to sit in his seat, and not touch anything, and not put anything in his mouth for 15 hours. Flying with a toddler is insanity. Doing it while juggling the stress of moving is even worse. Doing it while still reeling from being laid off is even crazier. Add in the fact that Shannon is 6 months pregnant and we're out of our minds. Add in a pandemic and the real possibility that this travel day was going to expose us to a large gathering of people and all of their cumulative germs and you have a recipe for a nearly brain melting level of worry. But we got through it.

H was great on the plane. In a near miracle, he was content with the toys, snacks, stuffed animals, and stuff that we brought for him. With the exception of a few diaper changing meltdowns and a half dozen trips to the back of the plane to get out of our seats, he was a champion. It was enough to worry about that 50-60% of the passengers removed their masks (to no consequence) on the flight despite the warnings from the flight attendants. 

Finally, we arrived in D.C. This was the first time we had been to the U.S. in over a year. As soon as we stepped off the plane, all of our stresses about selling stuff, packing, losing our jobs, false temperature readings, toddler behavior on the plane, it all went away. Perhaps we should have waited a little longer to breathe our sigh of relief. In our judicious attempt to minimize our risk on the plane by not taking our masks off for anything, we forgot that we brought two oranges and two apples for snacks on the plane. This obviously meant that we were agricultural terrorists so we were taken into custody by customs upon arrival. I mean custody. We were taken into a room where we could not leave, with a deliriously exhausted son whose jet lag/body clock/lack of nap/effects from waking up at 1am were all wearing on us. We had to wait for the customs police to get our bags from the carousel which took over an hour and then go through all of our stuff. I realize this was our screw up, but come on guys?! Can't we just throw it out and move on with our days? No we could not. They did their jobs admirably and we dealt with the consequences of our own mistake. Moral of the story, don't bring a plane snack.

After AppleGate, we took a shuttle to the car rental place, waited another 45 minutes for our mini-van, and loaded up our five suitcases and made our way to the hotel. We stayed the night in D.C. to regroup, which was fine, and then left the next morning for the drive up to New Jersey. We stayed there in a hotel to keep our distance from people and get settled in. Aside from fighting jet lag and H waking up at 2am most days, we've made it through and settled in nicely. 

After a reasonable amount of time had passed, we started to see some friends and family while masked, outside, and it has been fantastic. I think I was mentally preparing to not see them all for the whole year when we decided not to come to the US for the summer and that kind of broke my heart a bit. I finally reconciled with it, but when we were able to see them all again, it really hit me hard. H only spent 2 weeks of his life around his family. His aunt, grandmother, and great grandmother have now seen him from a distance chasing squirrels and climbing park benches and I am incredibly grateful for it. We left the hotel yesterday and just settled into a beach house where we will spend another week to ten days before driving down south to Florida.

Things have been moving fast. Since the time we found out we were moving until right now, it has been a whirlwind. We've moved to new continents. We've had job interviews and offers from multiple places. We've finally seen our families, and now we can kick back for at least a week before seeing whatever comes next, and we're happy to take our feet off the gas, even if for just a moment.

Preparing to Ship Off

So this has been a crazy few weeks. As I mentioned in the last post, we knew it was a possibility that we would be laid off as the school made that clear to the entire staff early on. So in our minds we ran through a variety of scenarios over and over just in case. How would we react if X happened? What would the plan be if Y? So when the day finally came, we were ready for taking next steps pretty quickly. 

Despite our preparedness, when we found out we were leaving, we were left with a lot of questions still. The airport in Riyadh had been closed with no signs of opening. The US Embassy, along with the Saudi government had organized a few repatriation flights to get people home on one way flights, but at the time of our layoff, there were no flights scheduled. That left us in a sort of limbo state. We knew we were leaving. We didn't know when. We didn't know how quickly we would have to sell our stuff or get rid of it. We didn't know how long our insurance was going to last. We didn't know what to do when we got back to the states. Also due to the weird state of the world, we didn't know if/when/how we would be able to say our farewells to former students or friends in Riyadh. Normally all of this is done over a much longer time frame. The nature of international schools, hiring, shipping, etc. dictates that most teachers know they are leaving at least 7-8 months before they do so. That leads to a lot of time to sell stuff and prepare for a long farewell. We were left with an undetermined amount of time but knew it would likely be between a week and a month. 

The first step was getting Shannon and H to the doctors for vaccinations and one last prenatal check while we still had insurance. Once that was settled, without any knowledge of when we would leave, Shannon got to work doing what she does best, organizing. She quickly set up some photo staging areas and some docs with all of our stuff we were selling. She struck while the iron was hot. We knew it was a possibility we would be leaving so we were emotionally ready for that. So when we got the final word, Shannon got to work. I don't even know that we hung up on our Zoom call with the HR director to receive the news before she started selling stuff. It was a buyers market. New teachers hadn't arrived yet because...closed airport, and everyone who was left was well established, so no one needed furniture or new stuff. Plus there was about to be a huge influx of stuff to be sold since there were significant layoffs. But because Shannon got to it quick, we were able to sell nearly all of our things long before the tears had dried on the faces of others who found our they were jobless. It seems ruthless but hey, we were in the same boat and it's survival of the fittest out here. 

So Shannon ran her little resale boutique day and night and led a parade of purchases and pickups through the house up until the day we left. All of these had to be masked, gloved, and/or sanitized as we went.  I occupied H and handled a lot of the packing and errands around the city including closing down cell phones and keeping H busy. H was just himself which entails a lot of climbing around and occupying our undivided attention which...was...divided during this week leading up to our departure. 

So as we continued our aimless purge of all of our worldly possessions, I continued to call airlines and follow up on leads to get out of the country. Then it happened and we found out that an announcement about a repatriation flight was going to be made the following day and we could book it early. We weirdly found out via text from the Saudia Whatsapp number which was totally unhelpful and unresponsive to inquiries to the weeks ahead. Just a weird cryptic..."There's going to be a flight if you want to get tickets..." and we were off. I booked it without knowing if it were a real thing. Six days until takeoff. We finally had our timeline. 

Once we had that information, we knew what our baggage situation was going to look like. That led us to some idea of what we could keep and what had to go. Shannon continued her sale. I forget how quickly a house can become full of stuff. After only three years in Saudi we had a ton of stuff. I realize every time we do this how much stuff is just stuff. It's really freeing to get rid of things every few years. People are like goldfish, we grow our possessions to match our surroundings. Just like goldfish....or something. They grow in size to match the bowl? I don't know, I'm not a goldfish expert. This metaphor is now pretty botched but alas we go on!

While Shannon sold our things and managed the parade of purchasers through our home, I made a few trips to the bank which proved to be delightfully inefficient. After a few inopportune prayer time closures followed by outdoor mobbed masses disregarding social distancing (in 114 degree heat) upon opening, I was told that they simply could not help me close my account because I had 7 dollars in it. I would have to go to a different area of the bank, withdraw 7 dollars and get back in line. But it probably couldn't happen today because they were closing soon. After another equally unsuccessful attempt the next day and a different teller informing me that they would just close my account if inactive for 6 months, I decided that was the best fit for me.

Then I was off to the cell phone store to close those accounts. This was a little easier from a timing standpoint but I ran into a problem when the one person in the store told me they couldn't accept a credit card payment because they were out or receipt paper. After inquiring why they didn't have multiple credit card POS systems or multiple rolls of paper I asked the clerk if he could go get one from a storage room or go buy one. I was told that no I would have to go to another branch. I don't mean to impose presuppositions on this gentleman, but if my experience abroad, and in Saudi specifically, taught me anything, it's that the first, second, and third answer from customer service reps are, "I can't. Go to another branch or come back tomorrow." So I decided this was not going to be good enough. I was moving in three days after all! We then had an awkward standoff where I made it clear I was not leaving until he fixed the problem or found a solution. He pretended to ignore me for five minutes. Then another clerk went out and got some receipt paper from another store and returned two minutes later. He tried to lecture me on how I was behaving inappropriately. We had a polite exchange of words that I would describe as a nice punctuation point on my time in Saudi. 

Once our stuff was sold and our accounts were handled, we moved on to the packing and shipping portion of our adventure. We were planning on selling everything but we did have some artwork and larger stuff we wanted to keep. During this whole transition, many of the teachers who traveled to the US for the summer were placed in a similar situation of selling or shipping all of their possessions, but they couldn't even be in the country to do so. Our community of teachers were incredibly helpful in taking care of a lot of that. We even had multiple colleagues doing FaceTime and Skype calls through their friends houses running the camera over their friends stuff so they could pick out what they could keep. It was heartbreaking to hear about, but a nice reminder of the support our community offered to each other. One of our friends, who was arranging for a shipping company to take care of things for another fallen comrade, offered to send the shipper over to our house for a quote. We had set aside two small boxes, roughly three feet by three feet and three feet tall. It took a few days and we got a quote back for $5,000. HA!?!

We were just about resigned to throwing it all out when I took it all on a whim to the local version of UPS. I took the boxes out of the car and ran up to the door, only to hear the faint but familiar sound of prayer call. I arrived at the door just in time for the door to lock. After they opened up again after prayer time to a moist me holding a box and sweating in the 100 degree weather, I got it all sent off for under $400 for both boxes. Shipping is a scam! I later got home with the paperwork to see a typo on the address. So it'll either get there for a tenth of the cost, or someone else in the neighborhood just got a bunch of free, cool stuff. Oh well. Stuff is just stuff. 

Onward we go, back to the US.