Airline Woes

Today has been an epic day. Of all our flights I thought Emily and I were the most likely to miss our connections. Emily was flying from Guatemala and I had two connections with less than 40 minutes between arrival and take-off. Shows how much I know. Right now we are the only two guests of the Inka Lodge with Nicole soon to join us at 6 a.m.

Prakhar and Tom are happily stranded in Santo Domingo.Words from the weary travelers themselves:

There were heavy rains in Newark this morning and the airport was
running behind. Our flight left late and arrived too late for us to
make the connection to Panama City. The only other flight today was
full so Continental gave us vouchers for hotel, cab, meals. We will
spend the night here. Another passenger on our flight had the same
connections to Lima, his home town. His fluent spanish saved us.

Moral of the story. Spanish saves people. QED.

Michelle had even worse luck than those two. Her first flight was cancelled causing her to miss her connection to Lima. American Airlines excuse? They couldn´t find enough crew members. Hmmmm.....

Frantic phone calls aside, it was a very unenventful trip for me. I did experience an "aha, I am in Peru" moment though. Upon disembarking at the Jorge Chavez airport a bus took us from the plane to the terminal. It dropped us off at the baggage claim for domestic flights. I was trying to decide if this was Peru´s new way of protecting the border when the bus driver came frantically running through the doors in order to usher us back into the bus. Apparently TACA airline messed up and told them we were a national flight. Ooops. All the Peruvians on the bus thought it was pretty funny, sarcastically commenting "Bienvendios a Peru".