Stamps in my passport

After a whirlwind four days in Portland of wedding planning (Jessica is getting married January 3, 2009), packing and visiting with a few friends, 8:30 pm Thursday May 15th arrived faster than I anticipated. We crammed everything in our bags, which we later learned were 5 and 6 pounds respectively over the limit, and jumped our first flight to Newark. We arrived in the Newark airport after our red eye from Portland jonesin’ for some coffee and Dunkin’ Donuts hit the spot. Our gate got moved because we later learned that the plane we were supposed to fly out on, which we coincidentally had just flown 6 hours on, had a weak spot in the floor. We gratefully switched gates and boarded a Boeing 767 (I like planes that are built in Seattle) that was crammed to the gills full of Dominicans who don’t understand seat assignments and hate flying. My favorite was the LARGE bottle of whiskey that some how managed to get on the plane that the three gentlemen in the row in front of us downed during take off, turbulence and landing. It was funny to see grown men hiding their heads under a blanket. We landed safely in the DR and I doubt that I’ve ever known terror like standing at the baggage carousel in the Santiago airport and watching the majority of my flight retrieve their bags while mine is still MIA. I held a count of the number of bags we had, 0, and the number of bags we were looking for, 4, on my hands for probably 45 mins, while Jess and I watched a cardboard box with “fragile” stickers on it go by that looked like it had been through a war. I smiled as I realized, “we’re not in America anymore.”