Okay, as I said in the end of the last one, we left Weds morning for a 30-hour marathon-trip home. We left the Jungle and took the boat back to town. We waited there at the airport for the flight to come in...2 hours later! We kept asking when it was due...apparently there are only 2 flights that go there per day, and the story we finally got was that they get there when they get there... but that they haven't been on-time in ten years! It was hot and humid in their little airport filled with people waiting for these two flights!
We flew from Puerto Maldonado to Lima where we were supposed to have a tour-guide meet us at the airport and take us around Lima for the day. I'd saved all of my souvenir shopping for that day, as did my roommate, Ali. Yeah...the tour guide wasn't there, and when we finally got ahold of their company and they got someone there, it was two hours later... so we only had a couple of hours in the city before we had to be back at the airport. The traffic was so bad, that it was hard to get anywhere. Long-story short we ended up with about 30 minutes to do ALL of our souvenir shopping and then about 25 mins to eat before we headed back. I stayed calm through the whole thing as I looked at my priorities...which were getting on my flight back home to the states! Nothing else mattered to me that day!
I will add at this point that one of the highlights of my day was watching the sun set over the Pacific Ocean in Peru, and being awake on the plane the next morning to watch the sun rise somewhere over Florida and the Atlantic Ocean. That's not something everyone sees in their lifetime!
I had planned on completely drugging myself so I could sleep on the flight home (midnight to 7 am or so) from Lima to Atlanta, but somehow I'd gotten busy doing things in the airport and had forgotten to take the pills soon enough for them to be working when I got on the plane. I had taken a whole change of comfortable clothes and some body wipes, and went into the bathroom in the airport in Lima and basically bathed and changed down to fresh clothes which hadn't been worn or washed once on the trip. I felt FABULOUS!!!
So we get on the plane, do all the details of an international flight, and then everyone spreads out and lays down to sleep. I found myself completely awake, so I took advantage of the time and journaled my thoughts and feelings about the trip. I started writing all the things I missed about home, and things I wanted to do when I got there and finished by writing all the things I loved about Peru and the things I would miss. It was quite enlightening to me as my list of loves were quite a bit longer than the things I'd missed! I want to put a few examples in here but I don't have that journal with me right now...sad! Maybe I'll add them later.
I slept about 45 minutes at some point on the flight, and was up the rest of the time...but it was okay. Somehow I'm able to do things like that periodically.
We arrived in Atlanta and got through the airport and customs quickly on our 2-hour layover, and made the flight to SLC just fine. I was so happy to get off the plane in SLC and be home... What a great experience!
No comments:
Post a Comment