November 30 - Dec 1, 2007
The Winding Way Home
Friday we woke up and packed our gear before heading out with Heide to the restaurant. We had breakfast before the three of us headed to the grocery store to buy stuff for the restaurant and few things for us to take home. I bought aji sauce and G bought teas that you cannot get back in the States.
When then had lunch at the restaurant. G tried their signature carne al pierna, which is meat on a sizziling rock. Before his food was brought out the waiter put a bib on him to keep his clothes clean. Is was so cute.
After saying goodbye, we headed back to Heide to pick up our stuff and drove to the airport. We arrived in plenty of time and were one of the first people in line. After checking in, paying our departure tax of $40.80, going through immigration and security, G paid for us to go to the VIP lounge. It ended up being a good choice because our flight was delayed. Finally our flight was called and we headed over to the gate and had went through a secondary screening.
At almost 11:30 pm on Friday we flew the 35 minutes to Guayaquil, where we had to deplane with all our luggage and go through security again. We then reboarded the same plane after another secondary check. Very, very safe. We were finally on the way to the US at about 1 am Saturday morning.
Our flight landed in Atlanta 30 minutes behind schedule, and after almost no sleep on the plan we rushed through immigration (thank goodness we are Americans, the foreigner line was outrageous), picked up our luggage and went through customs. We then dropped our luggage off on the recheck area before joining the huge security line. We stood in the security line for almost an 30 minutes, awaiting our turn to go through yet another check.
Once we made it thorough we has less than 20 minutes to catch our flight to Washington D.C. We barely made it to the gate as they were doing the final boarding. We landed at Dulles at 10:40 am where E, G's brother met us and drove us to his place to collect G's car. We transferred luggage between cars and drove the 2 hours home.
The vacation was great, but I think I need a nap. :)
Until next time....
