Preparing to leave...

The beginning of a new adventure. It all started toward the close of the week, hurricane Ike swept through Houston, the town I was supposed to fly into to fly out to Buenos Aires. No, this isn’t a picture of the hurricane, but just a random cool picture of an Alabama storm.

So the airport was shut down for 3 days, but was supposed to reopen on Sunday, the day I was leaving. I checked every couple of hours. Now they closed it till Monday… no good. I tried to call but was put on hold for 2 ½ hours, so I tried again in the morning. After another few hours of being on hold, I got through only to discover that I wouldn’t get on a flight till Friday! That would not work, too much intro stuff to go through, bad enough starting classes late, but in a new country with a new language, need to be there on time. So after much searching, me and Matt Tinkham (a friend from my school, also going to Argentina, we were supposed to be on the same flight together) we had to take our only option… pay a couple hundred dollars more and purchase an entire new plane ticket with another company, then request and wait for a refund with Continental. There goes some spending money, but oh well, no other options.

Here’s Tim and Mindy, very good friends I stayed with between summer class and …well, summer class (Argentina is on the other side of the globe, so it’s winter there when it’s summer here).

The kids: Sean and Jonathan, lots of fun to play with on the trampoline…

And Sarah, cute as can be… she likes to play on the new trampoline too.



Now I love to be last minute, but this was crazy. I purchased a plane ticket to another continent less than 5 hours before the plane took off. That was fun, still had to pack like crazy! Ended up only having about 45 min to do all my packing which I, of course, put off till the last minute. We went out for lunch, and then off to the airport. As I got in line to check in my luggage, wouldn’t you know it, and entire soccer team was in front of me… well, at least I knew I was in the right line!