Celebrating Thanksgiving for the first time!

It’s been a few years but the time had finally come to visit our family in New Jersey once again!

When booking this trip we tried (as we always do) to find somewhere for a stop over in order to break the trip up. However, we weren’t able to find tickets that didn’t cost us an arm and a leg so we finally decided to just do the trip in one go!

When the date of departure arrived, both Suz and I were a bit nervous about the flights as we didn’t know how Xander and Eloise would cope with being stuck inside an airplane for 15 hours to San Francisco and then another 5 hours to New York. Well, we didn’t have to worry as not only did they both behave, they both actually slept a few hours on the plane… so much easier than our last trip to the US and this time we arrived at night instead of morning so it was easier for them to have a big sleep in order to get over the jet lag.

Over the next few days we took it easy and gave Xander and Eloise plenty of time to acclimatise and to meet and play with their cousins. It didn’t take them long to warm up to their grandparents, uncles, aunties and cousins. As my brother Rene and his wife Amanda and their kids were also staying at my parents place, Xander and Eloise had cousins to play with all the time.

When we left Sydney we also left all our summer clothes behind as we were going into colder climate, however during our first week in New Jersey we felt like we could have used them as we had quite a few days of sun and hot weather. This only lasted for a few days though and soon the climate changed to what we were expecting it to be and we even had a few nights when the temperature dropped below zero…. no snow however 😉

While we were staying in New Jersey we ensured that we made as many trips to New York City as we could, with and without Xander and Eloise (read more about them in our New York City Blog).

During our time in NJ we visited a range of different parks together with my sister Zilia and her kids. On one occasion we visited a park which also had a small Zoo and a small train that runs around the park. The Zoo was great fun and Xander loved running around with his cousins, watching animals and just being himself…. so much that he started to climb on top of a fence and ended up going head first down the other side, grazing his face as a result. He was sad for a while but was ok after a few minutes and kept playing as if nothing had happened.

The main event for us during our trip here was Thanksgiving. Neither Suz or I had celebrated Thanksgiving before so it was great to be able experience a typical american tradition with lots of tasty food and drinks!

Towards the end of our holiday we managed to get together for some great family photos which were taken by a friend of ours, Peyton (soon to become part of the extended Medina Family). Time however flew past and it wasn’t long until our 4 weeks with our family were coming to an end.

The day eventually arrived and we started our trip home once again… We again were to fly home via San Francisco and on this occasion we had only about an hour and a half between flights. Before arriving at the airport we had been issued with seats on both airplanes and these seats were not together…. now we booked these seats months ago and should be able to sit together so we called the United helpdesk and they advised it was taken care of.

Upon arrival at Newark airport we realised this was not the case and we tried again to get seats together but were told we could only do this at the gate. Eventually we managed to sort the problem while at the gate for the first leg of our trip, but were told we couldn’t fix the San Francisco to Sydney flight seats until we got to San Francisco.

Remember how we only had a short time between flights in San Francisco? Well, when our flight was delayed by 90min leaving Newark we were quite nervous and certain that we would miss the flight out of San Francisco. We eventually arrived in SF and ran the whole way from the Domestic Terminal to the International Terminal and just, just managed to get on the flight (and our luggage made it was well). We did however not have time to get the seats sorted and when we got onboard we mentioned this to the flight attendants who were able to sit us up together and in Economy Plus (slightly larger leg room). The flight home was fine, both Xander and Eloise were able to sleep about 6 or so hours of the 15 and we were able to keep them entertained for the rest of the trip.

We had a great time together with family and it was fun to see Xander and Eloise interacting with family members.