28 hours on the road, a suspicious trimmer, and a $200 “tour”
When my husband signed a work contract in the U.S., it was time to move the family.
The tickets were bought by his employer. Very expensive. Not exactly optimal, though: two layovers, a change of airports along the way, and nearly 28 hours door-to-door. With two kids, ages 5 and 10.
Oh well. We’ll manage! After all, it was America, almost the whole family together (our 20-year-old daughter stayed behind), and on someone else’s dime — too rare a chance to complain.
The St. Petersburg send-off
We loaded into a taxi around 3 a.m., since our first flight to Paris was at 6.
Things immediately started going sideways at the airport. During baggage screening, vigilant customs officers tore through our carefully packed suitcase, hunting for some mysterious device.
They found it: a tiny trimmer we’d forgotten about. The officers relaxed, while we stared at the mountain of clothes on the table and silently concluded our plane to Paris would leave without us. Time was running out.
But the polite detectives assured us we’d make it and somehow managed to squash everything back inside — though now our shoes and toothbrushes were neighbors now. Minor details.
At the check-in desk, a stern woman in uniform demanded we write down our exact U.S. address on a slip of paper. Clearly, the Motherland wasn’t eager to let us go.
Paris
Paris left little impression. The layover was too short for any leisure — we spent it sprinting through terminals to make our New York flight, joining boarding just in time.
Surprisingly, the transatlantic crossing went smoothly. Nothing memorable, nothing tragic.
New York
At JFK we stood in line for passport control for an hour and a half, collected our bags, and faced the question: how do we get to LaGuardia with two kids and eight suitcases? Answer: taxi.
A roomy minivan pulled up. The smiling driver greeted us in Russian and introduced himself as Misha. “Why so surprised?” he said. “There are over a million Russian speakers in New York.”
Delighted to find a kindred spirit so quickly, we asked if he could give us a little sightseeing tour before dropping us at the other airport.
– “Sure,” he said
– “How much?”
– “Well, usually $30 an hour. Depends how long you want to ride.”
We decided three hours would be enough and set a cap of $100.
Deal.
For the next two hours our driver never stopped talking, seasoning his Russian with English words he clearly couldn’t live without. He tried to cram in as much as possible — about New York and about himself:
He was Jewish, moved here with his wife from Uzbekistan after the USSR collapsed, the last of his family to leave. Currently on his fourth marriage — all wives from the former Soviet Union. Here, he claimed, he ran his own jewelry business. Successful.
And the taxi? Oh, that was just a hobby.
Uh-huh. My husband and I exchanged knowing looks.
The tour itself was excellent — we drove through Manhattan, along Broadway and Fifth Avenue, sat in classic New York traffic jams:
We gawked at ordinary skyscrapers:
And at the ultra-thin ones — the city’s new architectural fad:
We even stopped to snap a photo with the Statue of Liberty in the background. The statue looked fabulous. Us — not so much. Twenty hours in airports and planes were written all over our faces.
The whirlwind tour wrapped up, and we pulled into LaGuardia.
– “How much?”
– “Two hundred dollars,” Misha said without batting an eye, conveniently forgetting our earlier $100 agreement.
We weren’t even surprised — so we didn’t bat an eye either. And honestly, the tour had exceeded expectations. We even tossed in a tip — to support that “jewelry business” of his — and shuffled off to check in for our next flight, nudging our half-asleep kids forward.
The final stretch
I barely remember the last flight. My husband and I were hanging on by a thread, so once we wedged our snoring kids into their seats, we immediately passed out ourselves. We woke only as the plane landed, 10:50 p.m. local time — 6 a.m. Moscow time.
Curiously, that wall of exhaustion turned into an unexpected bonus: fast adaptation to the new time zone. We went to bed in sync with our “old” clocks, and when we woke, it felt natural to switch into the new rhythm. Moscow and its time instantly became a distant abstraction.
The original Russian version of this article was published on September 13, 2019.
Powered by coffee ☕
Every drop keeps the stories flowing.
