And finally we arrived

After an 11:15pm pickup on Friday night to head to the airport, we boarded our 1:30am flight to Miami.  There are several key issues with a 1:30am Bogota-Miami flight. First, it's only 3.5 hours in the air, so even if you fall asleep the second your bottom hits the seat, you don't get enough sleep before you have to wake up. Second, even if you fall asleep the second your bottom hits the seat, the airline - which will not so much as serve you a pack of peanuts on a domestic flight - will proceed to serve a full meal on the Bog-Mia flight, with all the lights on, thereby interrupting any chance you had at sleeping.

We did not sleep much.

Which meant we were all grumpy when we landed.

Which meant we were testy when Jimmy, using a diplomatic passport, got pulled into Secondary when we were clearing Immigration. This has never happened when I've traveled with him, but apparently it happens to him about every other entry into the US. There is another James Story out there who has a bad mark next to his name. It doesn't matter that my Jimmy is 6'4" and this James is 5'10". It doesn't matter that my Jimmy travels on a diplomatic passport and this James does not. We looked like criminals being shepherded into the "special room" where illegal immigrants and wayward criminals get taken.

Once we got out of there, cleared Customs and rechecked out luggage, we attempted to get a day rental at a hotel, all to no avail. Did I mention we were all tired and grumpy?

So we found a nice place to have breakfast and hunkered down. They had bowl game highlights on the tvs, and everybody was happy.

After we felt like we'd overstayed our welcome there, we found another area to rest. The boys took the resting literally:

Dd I mention we had an 8-hour layover in Miami???  Yes, you read that correctly. Eight hours. Sweet Lord, have mercy on us. Oh, and we tried to get moved to an earlier flight to Los Angeles, but that would have cost $75 per person and when we were fed some cockamamie story by the American rep about having to pay this fee because otherwise everybody would just go on earlier flights which would leave later flights empty (no, I'm not kidding), we decided we weren't paying American Airlines any additional money for their dumbness.


So after 8 hours of an airport breakfast, a little napping, a lot of "how much longer?", and lunch at an airport Wendy's, we finally boarded the plane to LA, where without the threat of being awakened for a full meal service, some of us slept and some of us stealthily took photos as mean, mean payback.

(In my defense, I did not sleep the entire way as I watched about 2/3 of season one of Downton Abbey, which I will admit I thought was Downtown Abbey until I started watching it on the plane.  I understand now why a nation is hooked.)

(Oh, and I should mention that the flight was oversold and they needed 2 people to give up their seats for $300 each.  Soooooo, in American Airlines' brilliance, they decided it was better to pay out $600 to two people than to let the three of us go on an earlier flight that had space available.  Sheer brilliance.)

We arrived in LA - after a 5 hour and 50 minute flight - to find that our 1.5 hour layover had increased by an hour.  This gave us time to have a quick dinner at Sammie's Wood-Fired Pizza and a little leftover for quick airport shopping (meaning we bought snacks and magazines).

We boarded the plane for Lihue and got overly excited when there were only about 20 people on the plane.  Could we be so lucky as to have a row per person so we could actually sleep?

No.  The answer to that rhetorical question is no.

Turns out they'd stopped boarding because the plane that was supposed to fly us over the Pacific Ocean had landed with one generator out and they needed to see if it was reparable.  Um yes.  We need to see if that's reparable please.

Turns out it was reparable so they finished loading people on until we were packed in there like sardines.  Our one-hour delay turned into a 1.5-hour delay, which meant we finally ended up landing in Lihue after a 6-hour flight about 11pm, where we met my mother who had been sitting in the open-air baggage claim waiting for us for hours.  

Actual time in the air from Bogota to Miami to Los Angeles to Lihue = nearly 15 hours
Layover time in Bogota, Miami and Los Angeles = 12 hours

Waking up to this after all those long hours = PRICELESS

Let the vacation games begin!