We returned to El Dorado International Airport not knowing where the day would take us. I had actually tried to cancel our listing on the direct flight to L.A. because it seemed like a lost cause, but the website refused to cancel it. The kind ticket agent printed us tickets for both LAX and Cancun of all places. There were ample seats to Cancun and a two hour layover before a United flight from there to Los Angeles. Normally two hours would be more than enough, but Cancun’s customs and arrivals hall has been known to take more than one to two hours in recent months. We very much favored the direct flight if possible, but the ticket agent gave a rather contorted face when we asked him about the chances to indicate that he either didn’t think the odds were good, or his breakfast wasn’t settling quite right. He did happen to dash off just after finishing up with us.
After going through border control and security, we went to speak to the gate agent for the LAX flight. She made that same “bad empanada” face when we asked her about the seats. It just so happened, however, that the Avianca captain was about to head down to the 787. Wearing his silver-rimmed aviator sunglasses indoors, as all pilots are required to do, he looked at us, asked where we were based, then stated, “You’re lucky today. You’ve been cleared.” With that being said, we weren’t actually issued any seat assignments. We weren’t hugely confident given the fact that pilots (silver-rimmed bespectacled or not) can’t just create seats that didn’t exist an hour earlier. For the next thirty minutes we sat with anticipation and when almost everyone had boarded, we queued up and were given seats in separate rows. Although not perfect, we were on a direct flight to Los Angeles against all odds.
Knowing that nothing is ever certain, Nicole didn’t want to celebrate prematurely. She still jolts up in the night screaming, “Isabel!,” the name of a gate agent in Guatemala City who comforted her after being offloaded from a Delta 757 due to a miscount. The door eventually closed, we pushed, we taxied, we stopped, we turned around, we pulled back into the gate. There was an announcement about some sort of baggage miscount, people grumbled, the door closed, we pushed, we taxied, we finally took off.
There were no options for lunch — just whatever they slapped down on our trays. It appeared to be some sort of beef and/or chicken with maize-meal and/or potatoes with a sponge cake. Nicole was not a fan. I knocked my seat mate’s cake on the ground by accident. I apologized, but she was so loopy on what appeared to be a cocktail of alcohol and Xanax that I’m not sure she even noticed.
After some seven hours or so, we touched down in Los Angeles. Nicole and I flew through customs thanks to our Global Entry, which shockingly is unrelated to Nicole’s Hilton Honors Diamond status. Within thirty minutes of parking at the gate, we were ordering Chick-Fil-A and sitting out on our balcony enjoying a nice warm evening back home.
passports & pepto bismol 