678 days. 678 long days since thetwinsontour were last on an airplane. I thought I was never going to get to wear the official travel shirt again. If ever there were a time to use the much overused word unprecedented, it is now. But that 678 day streak has come to an end! We are on a plane to Uzbekistan!

We originally booked this trip for 2020, but of course that got canceled. So we booked it again for this year. There have been lots of scary, last minute moments when we thought we weren’t going to get to make it. Like when the Uzbekistan website where you get your e-visa went down for maintenance on September 6 and is still down. Or perhaps when we sent our passports FedEx along with an exorbitant amount of money to a company in DC to get our visas directly from the embassy. And don’t forget when we checked in at Kansas City and were told they couldn’t check our bags all the way to Uzbekistan or even give us boarding passes for the last leg of the trip.

But the most terrifying part of our journey to Uzbekistan was when the gate agent at Uzbekistan Airways in Frankfurt told us that we couldn’t go because our PCR test was more than 72 hours old! We knew a PCR test was required (that’s the Covid test, but not the rapid ones. You can still get them at CVS and Walgreens.) But we had read 72 hours before you leave your HOME. But they checked it every single flight. Guess what. By the time we made it to the third flight it was way past 72 hours. Of course it was! After lots of pleading and explaining to her that you can’t get PCR test in an hour and a half like in Germany and that it takes 1 to 2 days and lots more pleading, she finally made an “exception” and let us continue on rather than being abandoned in the Frankfurt airport for 10 days. Can you say heart attack?

In other news, our international flights had lots of empty seats. Lots of empty seats. So many empty seats that we each got our own bank of seats on both flights. I didn’t have to sit next to my sister! The Premium Economy (that you pay an upcharge to sit in) seats were packed like sardines (somewhat spacious sardines), but the cheap economy seats at the back turned out to be a better deal. Oh the irony!

Well that’s the highlights of our return to flying!

More to come from Uzbekistan later. Did I mention we got a tik tok? We have no idea how to use it yet, or if our nationwide 2G data through Tmobile can support it. So right now we are just begging for followers. There may be some videos. There may not. It’s the mystery that is the allure there, not necessarily the content.

Love,

thetwinsontour