Let the adventures begin!

Airport:

I said goodbye to Mom, wiped the tears from my cheek, took a deep breath and entered one of the scariest places in my mind: the airport. I managed to get my ticket and walk through security, but just as my bag was appearing out of the machine, the lady in the uniform yelled, ¨BAG CHECK!¨Shoot! They´ll probably confinscate the tobacco that Dad gave me and send me to prison or something. The guy searched my backpack and pulled out my key lime pie yogurt. I couldn´t help but make a sad face at the man. ¨Not my key lime pie yogurt!¨At first he was very serious, ¨Maám, this isn´t allowed past security.¨But, I think my relentless puppy-dog eyes cracked him because he said, Ïf you want, I could escort you to a room and you could eat your key lime pie yogurt and then come back through security.¨Ha! I should probably not make it a practice to follow random guys into ¨special rooms¨but this time my key lime pie yogurt was well worth it! After passing through security for the second time, I still had 2 hours to kill before my plane began boarding. I took a walking tour-de-airport. Once I got myself around, it no longer seemed as large and intimidating as I had always pictured.

We finally boarded Flight 2965 to Houston. I got seat 29A. No joke. Right as I stepped onto the plane, the flight attendent, who reminds me of David DeBlock, said into the microphone, ¨Welcome aboard Flight 2965 with non-stop service to Ancorage, Alaska. Please take your seats, we will depart shortly.¨ My heart definitely stopped and all the sweat-producing glands in my body were on overdrive. I turned around in terror, shock and desperation. The flight attendent was looking directly at me and said, ¨Gotcha!¨ Funny now, not so funny then. It didn´t seem like the rest of the plane cared. But, I think the flight attendent felt badly for making me FLIP OUT and he was super nice to me for the rest of the flight. We got a snack at the beginning of the flight and everytime he´d walk down the aisle, he´d drop a package of fruit snacks on my tray!

The same flight attendent, with humor like Dad´s, would come on the microphone and say things like, ¨Current weather in Houston is 20 degrees.¨ He´d pause and wait for his desired audience reaction (which was just me sticking my head into the aisle with a majorly confused look on my face). Then, he´d say, ¨20 degrees Celcius that is!¨ At the end of the flight, he announced that he´d be making one last pass with a trash bag so if we could all deposit anything we didn´t want, such as garbage, newspapers, cash, jewelry, children or wives, he´d greatly appreciate it! He was a big jokester and I appreciated him.

My second flight from Houston to Buenos Aires was in a HUGE plane. There were three different rows across with 3 seats in each. I sat in the middle of the middle row. On my left was Damion, a 9th grade boy from Alabama who was spending a month at an elite soccer camp in Buenos Aires. He was small and cute and really nervous. So, we talked about the TV show ¨House¨and watched it together when it came on and that really calmed the both of us down! The girl on my right was a senior at the University of Iowa, originally from Orono, MN! She knows Lizzy and Kendra-- small world! Her name is Natalie and she is a Spanish major studying abroad for the spring semester.

At about 11pm, the lights went out in the plane. I tossed and turned but didn´t get any sleep. Then, at about 3am, the older guy that was diagonally in front of me went into a cardiac arrest! There was a frantic announcement: Ïf there are any medical professionals-- doctors, nurses, EMTS, please come to row 28!¨I knew if Catalina and Amy Deeg were there, that they could save the day! Luckily, about 10 people came over. One of them must have been a cardiac arrest specialist (cardiologist?) because he became alpha male and took over. He kind of looked like Matthew McConagey in the Wedding Planner, but instead of saving J. Lo´s shoe, he saved this sweet, old man. And, yes, he saved him. For the rest of the trip, the older man had all sorts of tubes hooked to him, and an oxygen tank next to him. Although tragic at first, this incidence turned into a beautiful thing.

We landed safe and sound in Buenos Aires.
(The computer lab is closing now, so I´ll have to write more later!)