Honduras Days 1-2

Well, I'm back from my mission trip to Honduras and am not ready to get back into my routine here. The trip was an eye-opening experience with many stories to tell. The first story occurs over the first two days of my trip. Judy, Anna, Jeremy, Dennis and I are all in PT school together and we unfortunately had to arrive and leave on different days than the rest of the group because of our clinicals and having to come back for a 2 week class. We arrive at the airport on Saturday morning around 5 a.m. for our flight to Miami. When we get there, we don't know which airline we are on because of a communication issue that occurred between Judy and one of the leaders of this trip. Anyway, that wasn't hard to figure out because Judy and Anna went to a kiosk in the airport to print off our boarding passes and guessed that we would be on American Airlines - which was correct...

So, we have our boarding passes and stand in line for 45 min only to get to the counter to check our bags and find out that we are supposed to have a printed itinerary that included confirmation information for the flight. The lady at the counter was able to call the connecting airline in Miami and get that information for us but she was not happy with us. She asked us about 5 times if any of us had any confirmation information and each time we said "no." Judy and Anna thought that they were going to need to start a song and dance to tell her that we didn't have the information with us. She just didn't want to hear that we didn't have it. Anyway, we got on the flight only to arrive in Miami for a 5 hour layover!

Since we had so long to wait for the next flight and no one was at the terminal for us to get our boarding passes for the next flight, we went to eat lunch at Jose Cuervo Tequileria in the airport and watch the World Cup game. The game went into double over-time and ended on sudden death where each team had five penalty kicks. After the game was over, we had an hour and a half to get to our terminal to get boarding passes. We get to the counter and find out that the flight was overbooked and all boarding passes have been given out to passengers. They tried to blame it on us, saying "an hour before the flight, we give out the remaining tickets to passengers" and say that we should have come earlier. Judy and Anna wouldn't have it. We were at the counter an hour and a half before the flight! So, TACA (the airline that overbooked) put us up in a hotel with meals provided and booked us on the earliest flight for the next day. We had to be at the airport at 3 a.m. the next morning.

I was asleep by 5 p.m. saturday night and up at 1:45 a.m. Sunday morning!!!

For all of you that live or used to live in Montgomery and went to Vaughn Park, I saw Jim Holloway in the airport in Miami. He lives in Florida now and was on a mission trip to Honduras as well, but was staying at Baxter Institute. I would have been on his same flight if we had been able to get our boarding passes.

The PT crew has since created acronyms for TACA airlines:
Take A Carry on Always
Tickets Aren't Coming Amigos
Take A Chance Airlines

Oh, and our luggage stayed on the original flight to Honduras because we checked the bags all the way through to Honduras! Luckily, we were able to get our luggage when we finally got there the next day. The next posting will describe the next day's travels... We had a little tour of Central America! This is a really long post, so I'll stop now. Pictures will be on the next post.