June 20th - "This Was Doomed From the Start."

June 13th- slept 2:30am - 8am
June 14th- 3:30am - 5am
June 15th- 3am - 7:40am
June 16th- 3:30am - 5am
June 17th- 3:30am - 8am
June 18th- 5:25am - 6am
June 19th- 10:30pm - 7am

This has been my sleep regimen for the days leading up to and the first of this trip to South America. I'm beginning to think the whole thing has been doomed from the start. This could only happen to me--aside from my fountain pen exploding at a 12,000-foot elevation, covering my hands in black ink and rendering the practically brand new thing unable to be written with without wrapping the barrel in a Kleenex, the travel plans for this journey appear to have been marked from the beginning.

Monday, June 17th
Proposed plan: Pick Grandma up at 9:30. Take the 11:15 flight to Dallas. Fly out of Dallas at 5:55pm, arrive in Lima, Peru at 1:15am local time. 

I spent all night doing laundry, packing, panicking about packing, and procrastinating via Skype with several friends, bitching about how much I hate packing.
I ended up going to bed at 3:30 in the morning and allowing myself only 4 or so hours of sleep so I would be awake and ready to roll on time.
At 9:25, I went across the street to collect my grandmother, only to find her bags wide open, papers everywhere, and our travel agent on the phone. Turns out, thanks to the host of screwier-than-usual weather blowing through the Midwest this summer, potential storms in Texas were preventing any flights from landing that weren't already bound for the Dallas metro area, throwing off an entire schedule that was already cutting the contingency time desperately close. To make matters worse, no other airports were routing to Guayaquil or Lima, or at least American Airlines wasn't willing to honor our frequent flyer miles in any port of departure other than Dallas-Fort Worth. We could've taken a later flight, as the travel agency suggested, however, the main event during this foray to South America was an expedition to the Galapagos Islands, and as much as my grandmother--the master traveler--would tend not to believe it, they wouldn't stop and hold the boat for us while we made up for lost time in Cusco and Machu Picchu.

I went home and told her to keep me updated while I remained eerily unworried and undisturbed by the potential cancellation of the first real vacation I've had in two years--one that's been in the works for almost a year.
No more than five minutes after I'd stepped foot in the door, I got a frantic call from my cousin that went something like, "Are you drinking yet, because I'm drinking!?" As luck would have it, getting no workable information out of our grandma, he had called American Airlines and no flights leaving Dallas had been cancelled…only the incoming between 11am and 4pm.
…Fifteen minutes later, Grandma had chartered a small jet out of Epply's private airfield, and we were seemingly on our way to Dallas, in time to board our flight to Lima that evening.

Take Two. 
We were all halfway to the airport when we received a group text from my oldest cousin who was en-route from her new home in Ft. Lauderdale. She hadn't checked into her flight from MIA the night before, and upon arriving at the airport learned that, for the first time ever in the history of air travel, her flight left early. An hour early. When she arrived at the gate, she'd missed the flight entirely…or so we thought. Midway through searching flights leaving Ft. Lauderdale to any city that wasn't being redirected from Dallas, we each receive another text confirming that not only was her flight delayed, but by an hour and twenty minutes…putting her at DFW after us.
At this point, I was beginning to believe that someone in the universe really wanted the Dennis-Ford-Watson clan in Peru, or really didn't…

We made it otherwise uneventfully to Dallas, met Chelsey at her gate, and had enough time to squeeze in some nachos and margaritas before heading to the international terminal an hour before wheels up.

At 4:50, AA436 was posted on the departure board--delayed.
However, our 5:55pm takeoff had only been pushed back to 6:10. At 6:15, we were still sitting at the gate with the promise of a 7pm departure time. Then 7:15. Finally, 7:30.
At 8:05, when we finally boarded the plane we had bent heaven and earth to avoid missing, someone did the math and deduced that we would be arriving in Peru around 3 or 3:30 in the morning. In order to catch our early flight to Cusco the next morning, we needed to return to the airport in Lima from our hotel at 6:30am. Oh boy.

I'd like to say we spent the next eight hours curled up with one of those cozy airplane pillows that smells perpetually like farts, watching the in flight movie on repeat and eating warming-drawer chicken cordon bleu. But as we would soon discover over the next two weeks, nothing is ever that simple.

*****

The beauty of noise-cancelling headphones is you miss out on most of the activity happening around you during the time you spent locked into whatever music, movie, or podcast better deserves your attention at the moment. You become blissfully unaware…just as I was blissfully unaware of the four flight attendants suddenly rushing from the back of the plane up towards the cockpit.
It wasn't until the lights above me started flashing on and off that I even thought to look up from my previous frozen and pre-warmed pasta.

Over the PA, the head of the flight crew declared a "Code Charlie," requiring all hands on deck, and from Jimmy across the aisle, I heard, "Wait…are we being hijacked!?"

Following the Code Charlie, the flight attendant paged any and all doctors on board to press their call button and then proceed to row twelve.

(I suppose this is the full embodiment of coincidence, considering in the several hours before boarding the flight, Chelsey and I had asked Grandma what actually happens when a "is-there-a-doctor-in-the-house" situation arises. As it turns out, our grandparents had once been on a flight to New York City when a woman went into anaphylactic shock and our grandma, being an internist with a specialty in allergies and diagnostics, had to jury-rig an epipen out of something like a blood pressure cuff, a line of piano wire, and some antihistamine she had been carrying. Since the airline had been unprepared for such an event and neglected to carry a sufficient medical emergency kit, they compensated our grandparents with a bottle of the best wine available in the galley)

Without missing a beat, my aunt was pressing the call button above my grandmother's seat like opposable thumbs were going out of style. However, Grandma, in the midst of all this action, was also enjoying the luxury of noise-cancelling headphones, a glass of chardonnay, and the Spring/Summer edition of SkyMall. While a small mob assembled around our block of seats, she seemed to be seriously considering the merits of a potty training seat for house cats…

"Ma, somebody's doing pretty bad…you might wanna get back there before, you know…they're doing worse."

In the shuffle to get our grandma out of her seat, around my aunt and the small contingency of flight attendants in the aisle, while simultaneously debriefing her on the situation and holding a tray of wine glasses, our head stewardess, who had been quite rattled by the whole ordeal, dropped the tray into my aunt's lap, spilling red wine all over her jeans, shattering several glasses, and leaving the rest in the walkway. Since the plane was still engaged in a gradual ascent, the still-intact glasses started rolling down the aisle towards the back of the plane, Chelsey fielding whichever ones she could while the gentleman in the next row praised her with "Good catch," after every attempt.
In the meantime, Wendy had urged the flight attendant to tend to the medical emergency while we worried about the broken glasses, so she stood in the aisle picking little shards out of the carpet. Jimmy quickly reprimanded her for walking around a stemware mass grave without hard-soled shoes and dismissed her to the bathroom where she could scrub the wine out of her clothes while he saw to the broken glass situation.
The next thing I know, nobody's picking shattered wine glasses out of the aisle, but Jimmy is rummaging around in Grandma's medical bag in the overhead bin. At my next glance across the aisle, he's seated with all three overhead lights turned on, elbow propped up on the tray table, wearing our grandmother's reading glasses and using a pair of what I assume were her cosmetic tweezers to extract a shard of wine glass from his thumb and index finger.

As if this three ring circus weren't enough, apparently the flight crew had downgraded this current medical emergency to more of a medical perplexity, and had continued with the meal service as planned. From my secluded little window seat, I looked back and down the plane to see my grandma sitting indian-style next to a woman sprawled on the ground, surrounded by a crowd of concerned-looking flight attendants and other doctors, nurses, and EMTs, as the drink cart casually weaved around them.

Up and to my left, was Wendy, blotting her jeans with a paper towel, Chelsey still grabbing glasses that had escaped under seats and beneath feet, Jimmy (now with one leg crossed over the other and a glass of scotch on the rocks in hand) intently working glass out from under his fingernail, and the head flight attendant not-so-discreetly hyperventilating into a sick bag in the plane's galley.

Fearing whatever omen this could possibly be, I took off my headphones, looked around at our ragtag bunch of travelers and asked, "You think we're getting a free bottle of wine out of this?"