We agreed to meet at 11A and he’d take us to the airport, a pleasant courtesy. Having double-checked all tickets, passports etc. we’re set to go … except that, rather than the invoice I expected in Pay Pal, our host is expecting us to settle in CASH right then and there. Yikes! But it worked out to be PRECISELY the amount of US dollars we had just received from Claudette. So Linda (our designate banker this trip) goes home with a whopping ONE DOLLAR in her wallet, I have about $20. Just a little slim.
Leaving
the country was pretty easy. Luggage
gets riffled through, we surrender the remaining half of the immigration form
we’d completed when entering Mexico, and we saunter off to the gate after
purchasing some last-minute remembrances.
The flight to Houston is full, and the immigration line is lengthy but
does keep moving. We were told at the
airport that because we were travelling together we’d only need one US
immigration form, but that didn’t work as we don’t have the same address. Poor Linda was left to de-code a form printed
in Spanish while I processed into the country.
The big snag? SANDWICHES!! Because, you see, we are bringing FOOD into
the country. So I get a monster,
Hester-Prynne-worthy, red A on my form and, naturally, we’re diverted for an
agricultural inspection. The first step
is to muscle your bag onto a conveyor belt which is too steep for most bags, so
you wind up pushing your suitcase uphill until the horizontal belt can catch. I’m in the process of doing that when the
people behind me start loading THEIR bags onto the belt … that was a little
close-in but it all worked out. Then I
spend a good 3 minutes explaining to the health inspector about the
sandwiches: yes, they have meat … COOKED
meat, from last night’s dinner. Yes,
some are chicken and some are beef. Oh,
the longer one is chicken and the rectangular one is beef. Yes, it’s all cooked, by us, very
recently. FINALLY we are waved along
with dinner still intact.
Now
we need to re-check our bags, and then we fall into the food court for a decent
table and a decent dinner. Stand,
stretch, head on down to the gate area.
It’s not especially full, but the gate agent is already calling out
rewards for SOMEONE to volunteer to go home tomorrow. She only needed one person or we might have
thought hard about it, as the plane was due to arrive at O’Hare just before
midnight. But we do board, with our
window/aisle seats, and though the plane is pretty empty, we have a fellow in
the center seat. He’s really, REALLY
interested in being re-seated, but the crew understands more than we do … after
a small delay from scheduled flight time, the plane explodes with people who
have just arrived from Mexico. A good
number are seeking help as they have no English but can see that someone else
is sitting in their assigned seat (we were next-to-last row, so we had pretty
active supervision about seating).
Eventually everyone does get seated and the plane is utterly
packed. We head northeast in darkness
and silence, mostly trying to stay awake.
Arrival
at O’Hare was prompt and so was delivery of our suitcases. The weather was pleasant enough (it had been
warmer in Chicago than in Mexico virtually every day we were gone) so we waited
outside for the limo that a Groupon was supposed to bring us. After a while, Linda calls the agency … to
discover that the number of our flight had changed, it had not occurred to us
to notify them of that … they couldn’t find the flight and no driver is
coming. SIGH!! Back into the terminal to call a suburban
cab, who does come promptly and finds his way into my subtle driveway &
underground parking. He really didn’t
want to take payment on VISA, but since that was our only option, eventually he
caved. We rumbled the luggage onto the
elevator, rose to 4, padded into the apartment and fell right over.
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