January 16, 2019 - heading home from San Miguel de Allende

We’re up at 4:30, packed, and ready well before six.  There are glasses of orange juice and styrofoam boxes of cut-up melons waiting for us on the table.  We drink the juice, grab our fruit and haul our luggage out to the van.  Adan has already had to leave once because someone pulled up behind him.  Everything is loaded up and we’re on the road by 5:51!  Already ahead of schedule!!  It’s dark and we have a four-hour drive back to Mexico City ahead of us.  At first there is conversation about how great the trip was and what if anything needed to be changed. No one wanted to change anything.  Maybe we could have skipped the first butterfly adventure;  but there is no way to know until you get there what the viewing will be like!  Everyone loved the balance of ruins, architecture, and nature!  And everyone agreed that we crammed so much into our twelve days!

After a couple of hours people are ready for the sweet breads and applaud Ginger’s choices.  Shortly after that Adan finds us the perfect bano stop.  It’s a huge truck stop with fifty or more trucks parked all around,  In the back is a large restaurant and souvenir shop complete with everything a trucker - or traveler - could possibly want.  Four pesos gets you admission to large, clean bathrooms!

We had hoped to arrive at the airport by 10:30 and we are very ahead of schedule!  Yay!!  Ginger and Barb get off at Terminal 2 and Marilyn, Kathleen, and I are the last out at Terminal 1.  We give Adan our last thank-you hugs and start into the international-departures terminal.  It takes some wandering before we finally find the section with all the airlines.  Ah!  There’s American Airlines and the self-service kiosks.  I’ve finally got the hang of this - stick in your passport, answer some questions, insert your credit card to pay for shipping through one bag, and get your luggage tag!  There is a young woman there to help and I’m happy to let her tag my bag.  Marilyn and Kathleen both get finished about the same time as I do and we all set off to drop our (HEAVY) bags.  

Kathleen is leaving later than we are but we’re all leaving from the same area, so we set off to security.  It’s really easy!  You don’t have to take off your shoes, just remove your computer, phone, glasses, and jacket.  Poof and we’re through!  We locate our gate number and separate from Kathleen, wishing her luck on her flight!

It turns out that the gate in our text alert is not the gate posted on the departures sign.  Glad we checked!  There’s a deli near the gate and we each get a sandwich and hot chocolate, since the airline isn’t going to feed us anything but a biscotti!  

There is a man sitting next to us and he tells us that he’s lived in Chiapas for the past twenty years with his wife.  They met at a rock and mineral show out west.  Her family has been mining and selling amber for a couple of generations!  The conversation started because we have been watching a security woman searching and wiping down various individuals, including two infants and a lady in a wheel chair!  He tells us that this has been going on since The Cheeto was elected!  There doesn’t seem to be any rhyme or reason.

This conversation comes on the heels of a really disturbing one we had at the previous gate.  Marilyn asked a woman if she had been in Mexico on vacation.  No.  She and her two children had been spending the holidays with her husband who was deported a year ago.  He was brought to the US forty years ago when he was only ten.  He’s never committed a crime or even had a parking ticket, and missed the DACA cut-off by one year.  His story has been the subject of two documentaries and was recently featured on the Detroit Free Press’s website on the anniversary of his being deported.  His wife is a fighter and an activist and she’s determined to get her husband back.  They have an appointment with the embassy next month, with no expectations of how it will all go.  It was so hard not to cry when listening to her tell her story and seeing the haunted expressions on her son and daughter’s faces.  They all have in therapy for PTSD.

Miami

Anyway - our flight to Miami goes smoothly and I get to see almost all of ‘Crazy Rich Asians”.  We use the GOES kiosks to clear customs, claim our bags, turn them in to AA domestic, and find our last gate.  Part of the involves riding a sky train and we’re happy that there is someone there to help us navigate.

We run into our mining buddy a couple of more times!  Then we’re on our flight to Tampa and almost home!  We collect our bags and call Memorial Parking to see about getting Marilyn’s car.  They tell us to ride the sky train to the place where they dropped us off two weeks ago.  We get there, wait a bit (Hey!  It’s cold in Tampa!!) And the van comes to pick us up.  A short ride and there’s Marilyn’s car.  It’s lovely to be able to read all the signs and recognize the landmarks.  I’ve got my gate clicker and Presto, I’m home and the cats are flying down the stairs to say, “Welcome home!”  It’s a little after eleven and we’re all ready to fall into bed together.  It was a superb trip - but it’s always wonderful to be home and sleep in your own bed!!