Day 356 – 357: Long Journey from Lima to California
No pictures for two days.
Our flight out of Peru was a JetBlue red-eye to Ft. Lauderdale, and didn’t take off until 11PM, so we had a whole day to kill in Lima. Normal check-out at our hotel, of course, was noon, but we decided to pay for a half-day in order to stay in the room until 6PM. While we would have LOVED to show up at the airport several hours early and just hang out and booze up at the VIP lounge, the drawback to flying a small carrier like JetBlue was that their counter only opens 2hrs. before the flight departs, so checking in early was not an option. ‘No worries,’ we thought, ‘we’ll get a lot of computer work done.’
At 6PM, we had the hotel call us a taxi. The estimated drive time from our hotel in Miraflores to the airport was 40min without traffic, but 1hr was typical. We gave ourselves 2 full hours to get to the airport. THANK GOD. It took us 1 hr. 45min. – traffic was horrible, that’s a given, but our taxi driver wasn’t doing anything to make the trip go faster. He spent the entire ride on a conference call discussing his side business in some shady pharmaceuticals (at least he was using Bluetooth), so he was driving in the slow lane the entre time – never tried to cut people off like our other taxi drivers had. When we finally broke free of the bumper to bumper and were gaining momentum, we started to hear the dreaded, ‘thump, thump, thump,’ of a flat tire. ARE YOU KIDDING ME?! This was the fourth flat tire of the trip! We were starting to panic as our driver pulled over and slowly started to replace the tire with a spare – we contemplated getting out and helping (after all, Igor is such an expert at this – he could be in a NASCAR pit crew!) but we were trapped inside: 4 lanes of fast moving traffic on one side and our driver’s head on the other (Lindsay accidentally smacked him in the head when she tried to open the door and see how it was going). After about 15min, we were freaking out, wondering if we should walk the rest of the way to the airport. Luckily for us, the driver finally finished up and delivered us to the airport about 10min later.
Our flights were pretty uneventful – Igor was able to sleep a little on the Lima-Ft. Lauderdale leg. Lindsay took a motion-sickness pill instead of a sleeping pill, since the side-effect of Dramamine always seemed to be drowsiness, but for once, it didn’t work and she was up practically all night. We went through Immigration and Customs without incident (Igor had Global Entry, so he was done a good 30min before Lindsay) and got on the next leg from Ft. Lauderdale to SFO. When we arrived in California, it was actually RAINING (Igor was surprised – in all the times we have visited, he has never seen it raining in California). We picked up our rental car and drove to Lindsay’s mom’s house in Dublin (about an hour outside the city). It was so great to see my mom and stepdad again, but we were so, so tired. We had just enough energy for lunch, then we went into the guest room to “take a short nap.” We slept for the next 12hrs.