Our wake-up call came awfully quickly. I got up and was ready to go in 10 minutes. After a short wait for everyone to get downstairs, we loaded up. Yonkers took a taxi. I let a woman on our flight who was at the hotel ride with us. Rosse, Rafael, and Silvia accompanied us.

The chaos at the airport seemed lighter than normal and we were checked in fairly quickly. I paid $25/person in departure taxes and then got on line for security. Everyone else had gone through so Rosse, Rafael, and Silvia stayed with me. There were tearful hugs and good-bye kisses all around. These are wonderful people.

I was in the waiting room for about half an hour before boarding. We sat on the ground for a long time, taking off almost an hour late. I had a window seat with a spectacular view of Illamani rising through the clouds. Things were more efficient in Santa Cruz . We were only on the ground for a short while before taking off again. I wrote the whole way to Miami , finally getting caught up in my journal.

We landed in Miami 15 minutes late. What a ridiculous fiasco the American terminal is! We walked forever to get to customs. Then we had to walk by a zillion visitors' passport control windows which were jam-packed thus blocking access to the eight citizens' windows at the far end. After 15 minutes of winding our way through the crowd we made it to a US citizens' line where we stood for another half hour. Bob, Anne and I agreed that the only thing that could be done to make it more chaotic would be to have signs for US citizens written only in Cyrillic, Arabic, and Asian alphabets. Once we were through migration, customs went pretty quickly but then we had to drag our bags forever to recheck them. Security was the next fiasco. Our concourse only had one line open so they sent us into the crowd at the next concourse. I almost lost the Bolivianite pendant, but a sharp-eyed security woman spotted it.

We got to our gate and camped. I had a hot dog and a beer. Our flight departure was an hour later so I left a message to tell Motley not to worry about being late. We finally took off at 7:18.

Almost immediately after I wrote that last sentence I fell asleep. I didn't wake up until we touched down in Atlanta . I picked up my bag and heard a page for a bag left on the plane and realized I had left my backpack on the plane! Fortunately, it was brought to baggage claims and I picked it up immediately.

In our excitement to get to the vans we got split up. It took a few minutes to get reorganized. Our problem child's father met us at the airport and left with with his son. Then, upon leaving the parking garage, the attendant didn't understand that I wanted to pay for all 3 vans, driven by Matt Owen, Aaron Motley, and Sarah Lange. This delayed us another 10 minutes while we got this straightened out. Finally, we were on the road. Amazingly, within an hour of landing we were beyond the I-285 perimeter and on our way to Brevard.

Motley returned via US 276 to drop off Liz. I rode with Matt and Sarah stayed with us. We arrived at 12:45 and Motley got there at 1:00. After lots of hugs and handshakes our group dispersed. I got into the van with Anne, Bob, and Drew. I drove to their house where I spent the night so that I could make my 8:30 class with some sleep. The end of another great trip.