Sheep Guarding Llama

It is Monday morning and I was supposed to be in New York yesterday afternoon and here I am still in Atlanta, Georgia.  I actually forgot to set an alarm last night and miraculously was awake, completely on my own, at six thirty which was right when I needed to get up to make it to my flight!  Talk about cutting it close!!

I got packed up and ran for the shuttle.  Made it to the airport with plenty of time and it was a nice, easy wait for my morning flight up to Albany.  The flight went fine and I was in Albany at eleven.  My bag was even there, although Delta lost the record of it which was pretty upsetting for a few minutes as they decided to imply that I was an idiot for thinking that my bag would have made it when there wasn’t enough time for me to have made the plane – the opposite thing that I was told was foolish to think by the same company last night.  But thankfully the bag was there and they just failed to track it properly.  So unhappy with Delta.

I had a driver waiting for me at baggage claim.  We had one person coming in on another flight yet and one person had made it before me.  We had a towncar taking the three of us up to Silver Bay on Lake George in the Adirondacks from there.  I got to hang out with Jaha Dukureh who had arrived before me for about two hours which was an awesome experience.

We got to the YMCA Camp at Silver Bay and I got checked in, got into my room and made it just a few minutes late for the first afternoon session after lunch.  I was told that the sessions before that were pretty light and I really did not miss anything.

This evening, after dinner, which we ate outside being attacked like crazy by black flies, we had story time by a big bonfire in the woods which was awesome.  The bonfire was whatever but the stories were amazing.  It was so incredible to find out more about several of our coworkers and many of them had some truly unbelievable life stories.  It was a really moving experience.

Got to bed around one thirty this morning.

We started the day in Mexico City this morning.  Not where we had planned to be.  I was supposed to be in New York today and we are not even in the United States.  We had to be up really early to make our flight because we had to take the airport shuttle.  It was a rough start to the day.

It was dark and surprisingly cold while we waited for our shuttle.  But we got to the airport with plenty of time and did fine getting onto our early flight up to Houston.  It was a near thing, though.  The flight out of Mexico City was delayed, we were told, by an hour or more.  So we waited at the gate for a long time, I got us Subway to eat while we waited, and then I asked the woman working the gate how long we had.  She said an hour more, at least, and that there was plenty of time to go do things.  Everyone for the flight had long ago left the gate having been told that they had lot and lots of time and nothing was even scheduled yet.

Having been told that I had at least an hour before boarding, let alone departure, I literally made it to the door of the restrooms when they called “last call” for our flight!  They went, much like in Norway, from “in an hour we’ll start to board” to “last call” in five minutes!!  We ended up being the next to last ones onto the plane!  What a start to the day.  AeroMexico does not have their act together.

The flight this morning was not bad at all.  We were up Houston’s Bush Intercontinental in the late morning.  Francesca came and picked us up.  My new iPhone 5S, the warranty replacement one, was waiting in the Acadia for me.  I have been without a phone for the last two weeks.  This has to be the longest that I have been without a phone since sometime in the 1990s!  And the longest without a smart device since 2006, almost a decade.  It has been weird.  I am so glad to have a phone again.  I was not able to set it up in the car, though, as Apple only allows you to set up a phone over WiFi, which is a bit crazy.  And it needed to be activated with the carrier too, which is a bit of a problem.

So we drove to the Grices’ and were at the house for about an hour during which time I frantically worked to get the phone working, which I did.  I now have the basics again and am essentially functional.  My email is not working, though.  But at least I can get calls.  It would be pretty horrible having to travel to New York with no phone, email, texting or even a way to tell time!

Back in the car and off to Houston Hobby Airport, just Dominica and me this time.  No issues getting to the airport.  I got dropped off, checked my back and was at the gate waiting for my flight in no time.  Taking Delta through Atlanta to Albany.

The flight to Atlanta went okay, we got in five minutes late, not bad at all.  It turns out, though, that Delta had sold a flight with no intention of letting me ever make the connection to the flight to Albany.  I ran as quickly as I could through the airport and was not the last one off of the plane so I made it significantly before a potential connection could have been missed – the plane was essentially on time, I was at least off ten minutes before the last person and I made it through the airport far faster than a normal person could do and…. when I got to the gate for my connection, more than forty minutes before it departed, not only had the gate been closed by the crew had already left and the people in the gate area said that they had been gone for some time!  Talk about ridiculous.  They knew when they closed that gate that I was not going to make it.  In fact, this means that they knew when they sold the tickets that I was not going to make it.  The tickets had been a farce.  I was not the only one either, people quickly started piling up who were in the exact same situation.

Eventually a crew member came to mock us (literally, making jokes about how they had called “gate closing” while we were still on our other planes!!) but at least I managed to get a hotel voucher, even if several other people with less clout did not.  It was a horrible situation.  I cannot believe that anyone does business with Delta.  Horrible customer service.  And none of us got our luggage.  They sent that on without us, even knowing that we had no way to make the flight.  We asked how our bags could have made it when we could not and we were scorned for thinking that bags didn’t just magically zip across the tarmac and get loaded far faster than a person could get around the airport (probably true) and told we were ridiculous for thinking that the bags had been left somewhere.

I went to the Sheraton in a packed van jammed with Delta customers who had been abandoned by the airlines.  Apparently this is a normal thing.  At the hotel there was a whole staff of people ready with our room keys, all set up for the massive line of Delta rejects that we were.  They get so many disgruntled Delta people that they have a special system just for dealing with all of them!  That’s so crazy.

I got into my room and then went down to the hotel bar, ordered a salmon quesadilla and had a few martinis before turning in for the night.  My flight is quite early in the morning tomorrow.

Today is Saturday and today begins our journey home from Panamá.  We got up at the DoubleTree, early this morning, packed up, checked out and loaded up the rental car and drove out to the airport.  We have not done this drive ourselves yet and were not really sure how long it might take.  So we allotted a bit of time for it but the highways moved well and we were able to navigate without much problem so we made good time getting out there.  It really is not a large airport.  Even though it is the only real airport for flights in and out of the country it is pretty tiny.

We had to get fuel for the car which meant finding a gas station somewhere near the airport.  There was not a single one on the way there which was really frustrating so we had to get to the airport and then venture out to see if we could find one.  The traffic here was actually pretty horrible and made this take rather a long time.  We drove west on the surface roads and found a gas station relatively quickly and fueled up.  On the way back we decided that it was rather an emergency that we were out of pullups for Ciana and so we stopped at a Super 99 near the airport and Dominica ran in while I stayed with the girls in the car and she got the needed supplies.

We got to the airport, returned the rental car and got checked into our flight.  The crew was waiting for us and knew who we were.  They had bad news.  Due to something that they would not tell us (we are pretty confident from later evidence and information that it was backed up baggage security in Mexico) we had “already” missed our connecting flight in Mexico City, even though our own flight was expected to be on time, and that they had already cancelled it for us and we were going to be spending the evening in Mexico City and flying to Houston tomorrow.

This would have been perfectly fine and we would have been excited to have an extra day of travel and a chance to see Mexico if only I was not rushing to Houston to make a connecting flight on Southwest first thing in the morning and this meant that not only had my flight to Houston been missed but the cascading flights meant that my flight on to Albany had already been missed too!  This is a bit of a disaster.

We got through security and I spent the next hour on the phone with the corporate travel agency trying to explain what had happened and what needed to be done to fix things.  It was all very complex and no one seemed to understand and there really were not very many options.  Southwest had no other flights on which to put me tomorrow which really made things hard.  After a very long time we finally managed to get a late flight out of Houston Hobby on Delta.  So at least that was resolved.

Once that was done it was pretty much time to board the plane and take the relatively short hop up to Mexico City where we will be spending our evening.

We got to Mexico and got our luggage without a problem.  This took a really long time at the airport, nearly two hours, which led us to believe that the baggage security here was why we could not have made our connecting flight.  Obviously we could not have made it, it was scheduled in such a way that we never could have made it.

AeroMexico gave us no information about how to use our voucher for the hotel, or the name of the hotel or directions in any way, so we were kind of abandoned at the airport and had to explore on our own which led us to the wrong hotel whose taxi service told Dominica that there was no shuttle to the other hotel that we needed to get to and that we would need to take a taxi, which we did for $20.  We arrived just as all of the other people from our flight were being dropped off by the shuttle that AeroMexico had told them about, but not us.  We were not very happy.

Once we finally got checked into the hotel, which was not a great process at all, we got into the room, settled a little and then set out looking for dinner.  This proved to be a bit of effort.  We went first to one restaurant in the and found that the menu was all chicken and really nothing for us to eat. So we tried several other of the restaurants and were told that they would not accept our meal vouchers.  Finally we were directed to a Mexican restaurant, imagine that, and that they would take the voucher and when we got there, they had literally the same menu as the first place!

Thankfully we pressed on and talked to them and they agreed to make us cheese enchiladas.  Pheww.  Liesl decided that she wanted to have them too.  She said that she had no idea if she would like them or not but as it is good to try new things she wanted to try them in order to learn if she would like them or not!  What a big girl she is.  She tried them and did, in fact, like them.

Dinner was decent and thankfully free.  After dinner we were off to bed.  We have an early day tomorrow.

Today is our final day in Rio Hato and Playa Blanca.  Much of the day was spent packing as Dominica worked to get us ready for the trip.  I had he day off from work as it was a travel logistics day for everyone as we all make our way to the company retreat in the Adirondacks.

The driver from National picked me up at ten and I was back before eleven with yet another Toyota Yaris.  This must be the only car that anyone can afford here.  I’ve definitely learned that Toyota is what you get when you can’t find a Kia dealer.  These cars are not good and today’s was the worst one yet with really sloppy steering.

It took a few hours to get the car packed, the apartment cleaned up and everything ready to go but by mid-afternoon we were done in Rio Hato and on the PanAmerican highway headed east to Panama City for the last time.

We got to the DoubleTree in Panama City in good time and with minimal effort.  We know how to drive around the city now and can get where we want to go pretty easily.  It’s really no issue at all to drive the city.  The girls are excited to be back in the hotel as they like it here.  This time we have a corner suite (again on the Honors floor) with a neat little all-windowed corner perfect for the girls to set up their toys and play in.

We decided that we were super lazy today and needed our rest so we plugged the MacBook into the television, put on Modern Family and ordered in room service and called it a night.  We did nothing all evening and it was awesome.  Our flight out of Panama is tomorrow morning.

Today is our last full day in Rio Hato.  I was up early this morning, around seven, and found that our Internet access had been cut off.  I am getting an account issue with the ISP.  It turned of at 5am.  I could tell because I had left open a Steam chat window with Rachel last night and it said when the Internet went down.

So, no means of working today.  No Internet and my phone is gone!  What a day.  We tried all day, the apartment owners had people come over several times to look at the equipment because he didn’t believe us that the service was down.  It was kind of a rough day.

The upside was that it was a little easier to get packing done today and I got a chance to play some video games.  My first game of the day was Moebius: Empire Rising which I was able to sit down and play through, completing it, which was really nice.  I thought that that game was going to last me for quite a long time.  It was a lot of fun to be able to focus on it and really play through it.

After Moebius, I played through the intro of Cognition which is made by much of the same team and writers.  This looks to be another awesome game but the intro was too intense and I had to stop playing it with the girls around because they cannot watch it and as long as I am playing it they are going to try to watch it.

So after that I switched to playing Broken Sword, the same game that Dominica and I played on the Game Boy Advance back around 2002 when we were dating and had bought GBAs for each other and had that game.  We had gotten near to the end and something was wrong with the game cartridge and we were never able to actually finish the game.

I spent much of the afternoon playing the game alone at the kitchen table.  But once I was near where Dominica and I had gotten stuck so many years ago, far more than a decade ago, we hooked the laptop up to the television and the whole family gathered around for a really fun video game evening where we all played through the final hour or two of Broken Sword and actually managed to see the ending this time!

We had a good time and called it a night early.  Our travels home start tomorrow.

There was still no hint of Internet when we went to bed.