The trip home

The travel fun didn't end when we got to Akron. Fortunately all the driving during the week - two trips to Columbus and a quick-turn day-and-a-half in Kalamazoo - went very smoothly, without incident.

Then came Wednesday and the departure for home. Up at 3:15 am to get to the airport by a little after 4:00 to catch a 6:00 am flight to Chicago and from there to San Juan. Except our 6:00 am flight on American was canceled. The American people were very good (especially considering it was 5:00 in the morning). They got us on a Delta flight also leaving at 6:00. But instead of a relatively leisurely two hours in Chicago, we now had 40 minutes to get from one terminal to another in Atlanta to catch our new flight to San Juan. We ran through the terminals and just made the tail end of the line already boarding. But we made it. The new flight put us on the ground in San Juan nearly two hours earlier than our original flight. Yay! Off to baggage claim.

As usual there was a cluster of people surrounding the first leg of the baggage carousel. Elaine said, "There's one of our bags." Only by the time the carousel came around, the bag wasn't there. Elaine said, "I think I saw somebody take our bag." We waited a bit, got our other bags but sure enough, our big bag wasn't there. So off to baggage services. Again, the counter agent was very nice. There was a bag similar to ours that hadn't been claimed. Ah ha! Someone grabbed the wrong bag. The agent scanned the tag, got a phone number, and called "Wendy."

"She's out front, waiting for her mother to pick her up," the agent told us. "I'll go find her."

So off he went with Wendy's bag trailing behind. About 10 minutes later he came back, still with Wendy's bag. "She wasn't there." Back on the telephone. "Ah! I know where she is." And so off again with Wendy's bag in tow. Fifteen minutes or so later, he came back, this time with our bag. "She was in the bar by the parking lot."

The luggage thing used up nearly an hour of our "extra" two hours, but it all ended well.

Oh, one more tiny glitch: we couldn't find our car rental reservation and we weren't absolutely positive which company had the reservation. A couple of quick phone calls resolved that and it was smooth sailing home from there.


One - okay, two - more quick digressions in this digression from the real story: for all our local friends who complain about the condition of the roads in Puerto Rico, you should drive in the Upper Midwest at the end of brutally hard winter. Ay dios mio!

Many mainlanders complain about how people drive in PR. For the most part  I'm okay with it. It is a different dialect to the language of driving that statesiders are used to, but that's all it is - a different dialect. However...after driving more than a thousand miles on expressways in Ohio and in Michigan last week among people who know how to drive on expressways, I was frustrated on the Autopista (one of the few true expressways on the island). Because people drive however they want in whatever lane they want - slow in the left, fast in the right - and because they don't move over for over-taking traffic, there is no flow to traffic. It's chunky, clunky. Up to highway speed then brake for a slow vehicle in the left lane. Then speed up then brake. There is just no flow. I figured out that is what's frustrating.

Tomorrow one more digression for Mother's Day then on to Ishy's story.