I don’t know about anyone else, but I’m ready to go back on vacation.  Nothing like going from 90° F and sitting on the beach to 0° F and shoveling ice/snow.  It was an amazing time, with a gorgeous wedding, crazy reception, and many days of relaxing on the beach.  However, even this vacation started off on the wrong foot…

It all started on Wednesday night (the 16th), the day before we were to leave.  We were finishing packing and setting our alarm clock to wake us up at 2:30 AM (our flight was scheduled to leave at 6 AM), when I noticed that my throat was starting to hurt.  Not a good sign, especially when I woke up at 2 AM with a fever of 102° and a very difficult time swallowing.  Of course, there was no way I was going to miss our flight or try to wait a few days.  With the wedding on Sunday the 20th, there was no time for delays.  So I toughed it out, loaded up on ibuprofen, and filled up the taxi with all our gear.

Things started to look better after an easy trip through the various air travel hoops and we arrived in Miami 40 minutes early.  This was good news to us, since a recent flight change and reduced our time between flights to about 50 minutes.  Even better news came when the flight attendant told us that our next flight was departing from a gate right next to our arrival gate.  Alas, Miami airport had different plans as we sat on the tarmac for an hour, first waiting for a plane to leave our gate, which took too long so they moved our plane to a new gate at a different terminal.  Then we waited outside the new gate for a tow truck to pull the plane up to the gate (apparently this was some sort of special gate that the airplane could not just taxi up to under its own power).  We ended up having 30 minutes to run from one terminal to the other and just barely making our flight.  As I chugged some more pills, I wondered if there was enough time for our bags to make it to the new plane.  I’m sure you can guess what happened next…

Yes, as we made our way through the Panamanian customs, it was clear that no one from the Minneapolis flight had their bags make it to the second flight.  So we all queued up to talk to the airline representatives and I pondered how I was going to get our bags later since I did not have an address for the place we were staying, or a working cell phone (yay for CDMA!)  Luckily, my brother and his fiancee (who speaks Spanish natively) where at the airport and had local phones.  This presented yet another dilemma, as the shuttle van that was scheduled to pick us up barely had enough room for all of us.  It was fortuitous that our luggage didn’t make it since I don’t think we would have all fit.  After arriving at the house, I went straight to bed to try and get better.  However, the next day (Friday) was just as bad.  We all figured that I had strep throat, so we made a trip to the local pharmacy and got some antibiotics.  Amazing what you can get over the counter in other countries.  With drugs in hand, I could start working on our luggage problem.  Luckily, with my brother’s wedding in our resort, the resort staff were very helpful in calling/harassing the airline and making sure that they had the correct address.  Even so, we did not get our bags until Saturday morning.

Now that I was feeling better and we had our luggage, we were ready for some serious relaxation.  Of course, with the wedding rehearsal that night and the wedding the next day, relaxation would have to wait.  To be continued…