Long Journey Home

Our way back to El Salvador became an odyssey worthy of a blog entry. We started off in Redding Airport. Things there were mostly straight forward, the only real hiccup being due to the ever-changing “security protocols”. There were times where I was flying every couple of months and the whole thing seemed pretty routine. However, leaving the US for a while put us way behind. For people who prefer traveling with only carry-on luggage, the whole thing has become a bit outrageous. It seems that now I am going to take out a plane with my toothpaste! Of course, I can be arrested if I even make a joke out of this while in the airport. Makes it hard to deal with things using levity while traveling tired and frustrated… a condition we were soon to experience.

So, in Redding we only lost a few unimportant liquids and gels…I guess paste is somewhere included in that description… We arrived safely in San Francisco, well ahead of our flight to LA, and onward to San Salvador. Wasting time in airports has become an important skill. Since for most trip you are supposed to arrive 2 hours ahead for flights (4 hours on some internationals), even if your trip doesn’t include a layover, you will be spending a lot of time in airports. Katie and I hit the airport equivalent of a grandslam. For every hour we spent on a plane, we spent two hours in the airport (I know, for shorter flight this is more than normal… so, I exaggerate a bit…), if we include the unscheduled time in LA of 16.5 hours… it took us 37.5 hours to get to El Salvador. Good times!

When the flight from SFO to LAX finally arrived, only 2 hours late, we were pleasantly surprised… we had First Class tickets! So, we are all jazzed thinking that since we are on the same flight, with the same seats all the way to El Salvador…we might actually get some sleep and arrive fresh enough to make the trip all the way to our site, versus spending a day in San Salvador! I still don’t know if PC actually paid the boost in class, or if it was some dance of the random chicken… but it was nice. That is, until we arrived in LAX.

(to be continued)... had the opportunity to post, so I took it, will catch the next part soon!

World Turned Upside-down

Well, I debated a bit whether to include this entry into the blog… most of the people who actually read this blog already know the news, either through e-mail, or I have talked to them directly…

For continuities sake I will explain that we had to return to the states for several weeks on Emergency Leave. My Mom passed away while undergoing treatment for esophageal cancer. It was very sudden and unexpected. In hindsight, maybe it should not have been so unexpected…it is a very nasty variety of cancer… but while being supportive and hopeful, it is easy to fall into the trap that things really aren’t that bad.

It made for a pretty terrible reason to head back home for a few weeks… not only did we have to deal with a certain amount of reverse culture shock, but also a family and home that had been drastically altered. I’m pretty sure I didn’t deal with things all that well. I pretty much hunkered down for much of the time. Still it was important to be there, it forced me to face my denial… I kept expecting to see mom for much of the time that I was there…

Anyway, I’ll find other cathartic methods outside of this blog, so I’m not going to say much more here on this subject. I do want to thank everyone for their support! It was amazing how many people I heard from… made me feel good and sad at the same time. I also want to pass on how great the Peace Corps responded to this whole incident. I definitely felt like part of a big family here in El Salvador, as well as from all of the folks in the Washington office who had to get involved. They all made it easier to deal with a bad situation.