Our prop plane neared Addis in a torrential rainstorm. I had just been telling Jeremy that having kids has cured my fear of flying because I’m either asleep or helping them with something and there’s no time to stare out the window waiting for death. I was proud of my dry palms as we bumped through the clouds.

We hit the runway and immediately ascended again at an alarmingly acute angle. Sweat began to pour out of my nose, pits, palm- if it had sweat glands it was wet. I looked out the window as we zipped above planes waiting to take off. On the same runway we had just landed on.

The short of it is that once we were above the clouds the pilot explained that it had been too rainy to land, headed out of the city and turned around to land on the same runway on the other direction. The slightly longer is that (1) I don’t think it was the rain but the wrong direction on the runway that was the problem and (2) I could not reign my panic in. I tightened everyone’s seat belts. I made them look at the emergency preparation handout at the “brace” position and had them count the rows to the exit. I whispered to Jeremy that he would take Zeni and I would take Hayden and we would trample the suddenly incompetent looking couple seated by the emergency exit and get our kids out of that plane.

We landed ten minutes later, braked hard, and I burst into tears.
Back at the guest house we ordered pizza for delivery (that is a thing in Addis I was thrilled to learn), I showered off the sweat and was awake all night thinking about different ways to die.

There was one last full day in Addis. Jeremy and Zeni went to a movie and Hayden and I stayed in with a stomach bug. Jeremy made it three hours into my time in the bathroom before he reminded me that, before I tried the Dorze version of moonshine and rare cow meat, he had told me not to. I pointed out that Hayden, who had only ingested Pringles and Fanta for at least 96 hours, was also sick. And that his opinion was not helpful.

we arrived at the Addis airport at 1am and two painful, exhausted hours of security lines, immigration lines, and people cutting in line, were checked in for our ur Egypt Air flight through Cairo to Paris. Caio Caio Ethiopia, we will see you in a few years!