Nightmare Epilogue: The Chicago O'Hare Layover

Vacation was all fun and games, but all good things must come to an end.  Traveling home to Austin was going as well as it could have been, and then there was the Chicago O'Hare layover.  After a few hours in the Taiwan Taoyuan Airport, a four hour flight to Narita, a four hour layover there, and an 11 hour flight to Chicago, the last thing we needed was drama.  At 21 hours in, we were beyond exhausted, and United Airlines had given us about 45 minutes to do the impossible.  Gate C6 was two gates away from the very furthest it could have been from our arrival point.
First, there was customs.  Although we had already filled out a customs form, we had to wait in line to do the same thing electronically.  After that, we had to wait in another line to answer the same questions for some guy with a stamp.  Then we had to retrieve our previously checked bags in an overcrowded area and wait in another line to answer the same questions to another guy.  How can this possibly be necessary?  It's certainly no more secure; if we had wanted to lie about something, we could have just done that four times.
Then there was the shuttle bus.  At this point, our flight was boarding, and we were carrying a 30 lb toddler, 50 lbs of luggage, and two bags of airport merchandise as we ran towards the shuttle.  Two attendants yelled at us to run onto the bus, so we did, and the shuttle door promptly closed on George's leg.  The outer two doors closed on me, causing a pregnant lady with a toddler and two bags to fall onto the floor.  Having my feet swept from under me, I had fallen on my back, which hopefully protected both babies.  George struggled to remove his leg from the departing shuttle, I nearly lost my right shoe in there, and Drakeson's travel diaper had somehow gotten ripped off.  It was horrible and dramatic.  To add insult to injury, the same two attendants told us that we "shouldn't have done that."  What a helpful comment.  We got onto the next shuttle, and of course had to wait until the last stop for terminal 1.
Then there was security.  Although George had purchased TSA precheck, nothing like that matters when you're coming from Narita.  The security line was extremely long and extremely slow, and we were in a total panic.  Somehow, a guardian angel of some sort showed up behind us, and asked three different groups of people if we could cut in line.  We never would have made it without him.  Once we had gotten that far and unsuccessfully begged two TSA people to let us through, we took it upon ourselves to run up to the front of the line.  We felt horrible, but we were so desperate.  George told me to go first, put my shoes on, take Drakeson, and run to C6.  Even though we had made it to terminal 1, we had arrived in the middle of the B corridor.  I didn't have time to tie my shoes.  I grabbed Drakeson, saw a sign for C pointing to the left, and I ran.  After carrying Drakeson through crowds of people and giving myself an asthma attack, I was at B1.  There was no C corridor.  It was a moment of total defeat and despair.  Twenty pounds over my normal weight, needing about 14 hours of sleep, and tremendously out of shape, I put Drakeson on the ground and dragged him by the arm until we found the turn I had missed.  We yelled at people left and right, and ran up an escalator to arrive at a long hallway with two moving walkways.  Where the hell was C?  Drakeson was crying and asking me to pick him up because "it hurt," which absolutely and completely broke my heart.  Eventually, we arrived at the C building, but at C17.  There were still several gates to pass, and each felt like another mile tacked onto a race from hell that I hadn't signed up for.  In these moments of eternity, we saw George begging to get on the plane.  They had already closed the doors.  He pointed at his haggard wife and crying son, and the gate person reluctantly let us board.  We had only been a minute behind George; he hadn't taken the wrong way, but had gotten caught up in security due to the fact that we had a bottle of sunscreen in our (previously checked) bag.
We had made the flight.  Despite our booking requests, United Airlines had reserved three separate seats.  Drakeson was overtired and not afraid to show it, which I'm sure annoyed plenty of people.  I didn't have it in me to care; my body was reacting to the stress and fatigue with asthma, nausea, dizziness, and a bladder infection.  As a final gesture of professionalism from United, they misplaced our child carrier.  Welcome to the US.

Nightmare Prologue
Taiwan Part I
Taiwan Part II