Back to Our Little Casa

After a quick stop back to the cold frozen homestead in Idaho, we packed up and our neighbor Steve drove us over to Spokane International. We confirmed all our house guests who will be taking care of things and made sure the place was in order before we left.

The plane was ready to roll, all passengers in their seats and the pilot came on the intercom. "We have a slight problem with the plane. One of the tires has acquired a large gash, and we will have to get it changed. This should only take 45 minutes or so."

Soon we were asked to deplane. Then 4 hours later we were in the sky heading for Seattle, everyone on board hoping that they hadn't missed their next rescheduled connecting flight.

This Alaska Air flight schedule had been a nightmare from the start. It was booked, canceled and rescheduled so many times that we were already scheduled to overnight in LA on both coming and going legs of our trip. Alaska was providing vouchers for that. With the tire problem, our flight got us to LA at about 11:30 PM, a far cry from the 5:00 PM restful arrival of our original rebooked schedule.

As we picked up our voucher for the hotel, the young Alaska manager noted all our problems and tossed in some breakfast and snacks vouchers to make us feel a bit better.

Up early we had our breakfast and bought the $24 of snacks the voucher allowed us and boarded our flight. Everything went smoothly from there and we arrived at the Casa Grande by 4:00 PM.

Things went somewhat quickly at the airport. We flew through immigration, but when we hit customs we also hit the red light. You know the button you push and if you get green you go if you get red you get searched. Well, when we got the red the lady had so many people coming at her in both directions that she told us to put the bags through the scanner and then she walked away. Several minutes later she came back and call on a young man to start up the scanner and finalize our bag check. The fellow was playing on his phone so he ran our bags through and proceeded to ignore us. We watched him text, and looked around. Finally, we grabbed our bags and hurried out the door to a taxi.

Now we are settling in and getting back to a Melaque way of life. A walk in the morning, volleyball at 11: 00 AM, and the day moves on.

We are reestablishing our friendships, meeting new faces and checking out our little home away from home. Life is good!