Friday August 10th, 2018

Joy and I arrived in Houston in the early afternoon and waited about three hours for our boarding time for our flight to Lima, Peru.  We shared a calzone and some slices of pizza, decisions we later regretted. Carbs, grease, and cheese are not good nor conducive to long-haul flights to another continent.

I had a beer, a Vietnamese coffee porter from a local brewery called 8th Wonder. The beer was dark as Guinness but lighter on the palate than I expected, easy to drink and refreshing. Joy had a 7&7, with Crown Royal substituted for Seagrams. Joy struggled to download books to her Kindle while I figured out some last minute job commitments.

Around 5PM, we started to board the plane, a United 757(?), the kind with the two rows on each side of plane and the big three-seater row in the middle. I told Joy that I’d never been on a plane like that before, and she was surprised, but the majority of my flights have been on domestic carriers- I’ve only been on the one set of transcontinental flights to and from Europe in 2017, and that was on WOW Air, a budget carrier with smaller planes.

I mentioned to her that I didn’t even know if those big two-deck planes exist because I’ve only seen them in highly accurate movies like Air Force One and Snakes on a Plane. We upgraded to an exit row which was a huge a boon. It was great to sit alone, just us, and to have extra legroom. There was seatback entertainment, and once we stowed our bags and settled into our seats, Joy started watching Game Night with Rachel McAdams and Jason Bateman.

She finished Game Night before the plane took off. We were delayed from taking off due to lightning. The baggage handlers weren’t allowed to work on loading the plane if there had been a lightning strike within so many miles in the last fifteen minutes. Every time there was a lightning strike, the clock reset and they couldn’t finish loading baggage on the plane. This cycle continued for an hour and a half or more.

When we finally took off, it was clear that we wouldn’t make our connecting flight in Lima. I emailed Joy’s mother, Liz, who planned the trip for us, and let her know what the situation was.

By the time we landed in Lima just after midnight, Liz had emailed back a huge list of possible options. United Airlines was not so helpful. They replaced our flight with a similar flight the next evening, with no offer of a hotel. We thought we had to be in La Paz the next morning in order to meet up with our tour group, so that wasn’t going to work. We set out to find a new solution.

Next: Lima, Peru