Travel on June 11th?! No way!
So Monday, June 3rd, we get a text; “Can you be in Colombia by the 11th?” Claudia responded saying “Not really. Wes still doesn’t have his visa so we don’t have airline tickets yet or any arrangements made”. They said if we weren’t there by the 11th, the process would be delayed a couple of weeks probably into July. Well that was unacceptable so we got moving. A lot of loose ends needed to be tied up and with a LOT of help from our friends, we barely made it. I did my best to cover my butt at work but I’m sure I forgot some stuff. I still have to scramble to ensure I take advantage of parental leave otherwise my finance department will be out to get me. But back to getting ready, Michael from church is maintaining the pool and lawn mowing. Rhea & Will amre handling the garbage and keeping an eye on Amazon type packages. Jane is taking care of plants and mailing off announcements that we suddenly didn’t have any time for. We needed to get Carlos from church to do some handyman type things f stuff that we ran out of time for such as room painting. The Flores’ offered to assemble the crib which we still haven’t received yet. Not kidding, a LOT of stuff that with the one more week we were anticipating, could have been done (minus the pool and lawn maintenance of course). But let’s not forgetting the night of the 10th and packing. Carmela and Susana came to help pack! It was so weird watching Carmela digging into a laundry basket of freshly cleaned clothes and helping my wife pick her clothes. But without her help, I’m sure Claudia would still be packing! But even with all the help, we got to bed somewhere around 1230 am.
No worries though, that hour-ish worth of sleep was magical considering the 2:00 am wake-up call. UBER showed around 2:30am and we were off to The airport with our 13 bags. We had our first hiccup at the counter though. Remember when I mentioned that I had not received my visa from the Colombian consulate? The airline would not allow me to board without a return flight. We didn’t buy round trip pending the visa situation since we knew we were going to down for 6-8 weeks. So while I dealt with the bags, Claudia went online and bought a return ticket for me, just to get me on the airplane. Completely fake ticket since we cancelled it once we got into Colombia.
Flights were uneventful. I prefer flying Delta or American Airlines into Colombia. They seem to have more space than Avianca. Arrived around 1:00 pm. Got our Renault Duster rental & on our way to the AirBNB. I’ll add pictures once I’m on an actual computer. We were all so exhausted, even though we all slept on the flights. Ordered in dinner and went to bed. Unfortunately, Claudia broke a tooth so an unexpected dentist visit tomorrow should muddy our day a bit.
I’ll add pictures tomorrow to this post. iPad is not cooperating with me right now for adding pics.