Waiting in Atlanta

Well, it's true, 28% of the world waits in Atlanta in order to go somewhere else! Who would have thought, Atlanta as the crossroads of the world (I always thought it was Pittsburgh). Listening to the people, everyone seems to wait forever in Atlanta as well. Maybe the reformers were wrong. Maybe there really is a purgatory, the Catholic church just had the wrong location.

Well, we got to Richmond, only to find out that most of our baggage was overweight. We thought we had a connection to sneak our bags onto the plane, but it didn't work out quite as we had hoped, so it was a game of musical baggage to shift things around (fortunately, I had under-packed). I don't know if you've ever tried to pack up 40 pairs of shoes and then shift them around, but it is quite a challenge, even if they are little shoes.

We got to Atlanta and Rob had to go fetch his bag which the stewardess insisted had to be stored under the plane (I blame myself for not getting it into the overhead fast enough) even though it was clearly smaller than most of the bags in the overhead. Anne's passport couldn't be read in the card reader, plus she sent a voice mail to the wrong Rob when we were trying to find Rob Goff (Anne's clearly not our technical genius on this expedition).

The real highlight of the trip so far is that Anne got carded when we were ordering lunch. Yes, that is correct, she got carded - she really had to produce her ID before the waiter would bring the beer. It made her day. We toyed around with taking the flight to Rome (the gate is next to our gate) but we figured, someone would look at the pictures and figure it out.

Well, we're all sitting here waiting for our plane to Quito. It's an interesting collection of people who travel to Quito. The next time we post to you, we'll be in a different continent!