Schedule Changes and False Starts!

Day one of our trip and we are getting a taste of chaos already! Yesterday afternoon, we received news of some pretty massive changes to our itinerary (due to Air Madagascar's decision to no longer fly to Kenya) and spent the latter part of the day working with our travel agent to readjust things so that our time in Madagascar and Tanzania wasn't shortened. We will now be returning from our adventures on June 10, instead of June 7. The other changes are reflected in our schedule on the right side of the blog. The good news, though, was that both of our cars arrived intact on the car carrier from Seattle, so we were delighted that Nelly and Gus actually made it safely to Peachtree City before we took off! Another good thing is that last night, on what we expected to be our last night in the country for a good while, we met Peter's ex-colleague Don in Atlanta. He is in Atlanta for his first time from Seattle attending a death-penalty conference, so we went to Mary Mac's Tearoom together to sample some authentic southern cooking. We had a great time with him, reminiscing about not-so-old times.

One of the major schedule changes was that the flight out to Guatemala moved from 10:10 a.m. to 7:30 a.m. this morning. My very patient parents agreed to wake up at the crack of dawn and still take us to the airport, so with very little sleep (I think I got none because I was so excited!)we set out at 5:30 a.m. for the Atlanta airport. When we got there, though, we ended up standing in an excruciatingly-slow line for an hour and a half while the surly attendant waited on the six people in front of us (yes, that's right--she was processing people at a rate of one every 20 minutes!). During our wait, we learned from other travellers that our 7:30 flight was cancelled, but that there was a possiblility of getting on our original 10:10 flight. We were frustrated to say the least. I took some solace in the little six-year old girl in front of us playing with her dog. But then, the dog climbed onto my backpack (holding all of my possessions for the next 3 months) and peed! That's pretty much how the morning went.

When we finally got up to the counter, the surly attendant informed us that we would be missing the only flight to Guatemala for the day, which left Fort Lauderdale, FL at 10:40 and that there would not be another until Monday. We resigned ourselves to flying to Ft. Lauderdale on Sunday, so that this same scenario would not repeat itself on Monday (and to save my parents another early trek to the airport). We then came back to Peachtree City, drowned our sorrows in fried chicken breakfast biscuits and went back to bed.

Keep your fingers crossed that we get to Guatemala on Monday!