Stumble and Recovery

The traditional firecracker send off marked the end of months of planning and anticipating, and the actual start of our new journey.

At the Houston airport, we met up with Holly and Matt, happy and excited like children staying up for Santa Claus.

But as the airline postponed our flight to Miami six times in the space of three hours, a foreshadowing of doom began to cast a pall.  

Finally, the flight was called and loaded…. As we prepared to pull away from the gate, phones began dinging all over the plane, followed by disbelieving gasps.  The flight had been cancelled.

We deplaned and I was glumly concluding that there would be no way to get to Miami, connect to a flight to Guayaquil and make it to our ship in the Galapagos by the appointed time.    

Suddenly the gate agent raced through the area shouting, “The flight’s been reinstated!  We’re going to reboard!”

Whaaat?  All righty, then.  Re-board we did.   Only once we were away from the gate and moving on the tarmac did a very weary and careworn captain advise us that in 30 years of flying, he had never seen such a mish-mosh, revealing that the flight had come a hair’s breadth from being cancelled again after the second boarding.

We will never know what was going on with this airline that shall remain nameless (a very large international passenger carrier based in Dallas……..).  We arrived at about 1 am in Miami, weaved our way through throngs of people filing lost-baggage claims, and thankfully retrieved our bags to repair to the fleabag airport hotel where we had the foresight to book rooms.

As I not so much fell asleep as drifted into numbness, my sole coherent thought was that the only direction for this trip would be up……..

And surely enough, the next day we winged our way south to Guayaquil…..

Passed a quiet afternoon and night preparing for the next leg…..

And finally arrived in San Cristobal…….

…… the jumping-off point for a week’s voyage through Galapagos on the good ship Origin.  

Whew! Thanks be to the powers that be, we are well and truly on our way!