Saturday, March 29, 2008

Unlike our previous trips, this one had excitement before we left. Our passports were not ready with the Brazilian consulate until Thursday – 48 hours before takeoff. So Justin had to take off a day from work - right in the middle of trial - to go up with Crystal and plead for them. We drove up to Los Angeles early that morning, and beg with the company we had sent our passports to in January. It was looking very dicey, but fortunately we got them around lunch time and drove back down to San Diego.

This trip was also different in that we were not anxiously awaiting it. Again, Justin was helping out on a trial that had closing arguments on Friday, and had his mind close to 100% on that (plus the passport thing) right up until the very end – he probably botched something packing. Also, because of the passports, we tried not to get our hopes up too much in case it went bad.

Back to today, we woke up early, left the house a little after 7:30. There was an accident on 405, but fortunately we saw a warning sign and took the 605 to 105 just before getting stuck. We managed to get to LAX at 9:30 for our 12:30 flight. This was only to find out Crystal was a little off, and had 12:30 in her head since she wanted to be three hours early for our 3:30 flight. So we were actually 3+3 hours early. We had plenty of time, so we had an early lunch to adjust for time. After lunch, we downloaded some good songs we heard on KROQ on the way up – one by MGMT and one by the Flobots.

Our flight did leave on time, and getting on board was easy. We were side by side, but seemed like less leg room than on BA to Africa. But we did have a lot of different movie choices and games. Crystal watched Atonement; Justin watched Training Day and played Tetris, also read a bit of 1491. Unlike the last time (2006), we did not stop in Lima, but flew direct to Santiago. Both of us were asleep by the time we crossed over the Galapagos (and the equator).