It's good to be back home, on "our" beach and warm! I spent 55 years in the Midwest; I know a little bit about winter and cold and the seasons. Northern Ohio and southern Michigan were COLD, really cold considering it's the first week of May. I had to break my winter coat out of storage at my sister-in-law's house. I could have managed without it except I gave my heavy sweatshirt to Annelta who is from St Lucia and who was even colder than I was.
Before I get into the main story - the reason for our trip to the States at this time - I want to say a bit about the actual travel part of the trip.
From the get-go our travel could have been a disaster. We arrived at the San Juan airport without incident. Went to the US Airways kiosk and checked in. Took our tagged checked bag to the bag drop. Then we found out our flight was delayed two-and-a-half hours. Which meant we missed our connection in Charlotte, NC for Akron, OH, since our flight wouldn't leave San Juan until after our connecting flight left Charlotte. As we stood in a long line of fellow travelers, a woman ahead of us in line walked away from the counter announcing, "No more flights. We're all spending the night in San Juan." Not what we wanted to hear. Eighty-one miles from home and already we're stranded for the night.
Ah, but not so. When it was our turn at the counter, the counter agent, who was in the middle of trying to reroute several hundred passengers and had every right to be short-tempered and curt, was gracious and extremely helpful. When we told her about our already-checked bag, she immediately called down to the ramp, had someone find and pull our bag and then retag it with our new flight numbers.
When we got to the departure gate, we realized that on our newly rebooked flight, we weren't sitting together. We weren't even in the same boarding "zone." We decided to get on together anyway. The gate agent was another guy who had every excuse to be cranky since he had just loaded one plane as quickly as possible because another plane - ours - was waiting for the gate to unload and then reload with all the passengers booked for that flight and all the rebooked passengers like us. This agent noticed we were boarding together but with different seat assignments. He asked us, "Would you like to sit together?" Of course we would! So in the midst of all the chaos he worked - and I mean worked - to find us seats together on a nearly full aircraft.
I'm sorry I didn't get the names of these two people. I would truly like to thank them by name.
So we got to Charlotte and made our new, much later connecting flight. We landed in Akron-Canton just shy of midnight. Pick up our reserved rental car and "home" to bed.
Ah but not so. Because we were due in much earlier, and our reservation was for much earlier, when we didn't show up on the plane we were supposed to be on, the car hire people had no obligation to wait for us. So they didn't. When we got to the car hire desks, all of them were dark.
So we missed spending the night in San Juan. We avoided spending the night in Charlotte. Now we were going to have to spend the night in the Akron-Canton airport, 25 minutes from our destination, because the car hire places were closed???? Give me a break! And someone did.
We saw movement around the last rental desk. Hertz. It wasn't who our reservation was with but at quarter after twelve in the morning, who's going to be picky? We stopped him just as he headed for the exit door. Mike, the Hertz agent, came back, turned on the lights and rented us a car.
At least three different times the trip north could have turned ugly. Because of three people along the way, it didn't.
That was our trip north. Tomorrow - our trip home! Then on to Ismael and Annelta.
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