Wednesday, November 18, 2009

South America Day 0: On the Road Again

I'm finally going to start blogging up the South America trip from last fall. Following my earlier pattern I'll let the posts post on today's current date, but will put the date the events happened at the top of the post. Once a post's been up a month or so I'll move it back to its "native date". Have fun reading!

November 18, 2009; 7 AM

Dad and I are at it again: we're getting ready to board our plane. Not the plane to Santiago, oh no. This plane goes to Miami, where we will catch the plane to Santiago. About 28 hours later. That's right - we're going down a day early. Dad always prefers this, especially in a season (like NOVEMBER in OHIO) where there are potential weather delays. Better to take an extra day off work than risk missing the boat - literally!

As it turns out, the weather today is lovely - ridiculous, even. It was over 60 degrees out when my friend Christina picked us up for the trip to the airport (Thanks, Christina!) We were massively early for our flight so we breezed through Security without challenge and settled down in some conveniently placed chairs: right in front of the departure gate board and about five yards from the pastry/coffee shop. Our gate wasn't posted yet, but I figured no problem - they had hours, right?

Two hours of knitting (me) and newspaper reading (Dad) later, there still was no gate posted for our flight. Getting a little nervous - we should be boarding soon! - I did a walkaround and found our mystery gate, which by this time was staffed - by the same dude who'd checked in our baggage earlier. I guess he wears lots of hats. If he's the pilot, I'm getting off! I rescued Dad and the rest of our co-passengers who were milling around the departures board.

One of our fellow passengers is traveling with four little peach-faced lovebirds. She has them in a homemade carrier that looks like a two-story clear acrylic shoebox. It was rather entertaining watching them go through Security.

Once they decided to tell us where our gate was, our travel to Miami via Atlanta was uneventful, if dull. I got a chance to do my half-hour walk in the Atlanta concourse, which is a ridiculous half-mile long. I only needed two circuits to fill my time. Ominously, I'm beginning to notice cold symptoms - this is a bad sign, but I will try to nuke them with Cold-Eez.

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