When we got to Gisi's place in Astoria to leave my car, I needed to put my car keys on the kitchen table for them, in case they need to move my car while we're gone. So I opened the outer black door, opened the inner white door and left the keys in that lock while I went to get my bags, completely forgetting that the black door locks automatically. So the inner door was open, keys in the lock, unreachable through the locked black door. Gisi called her upstairs neighbor who came down and opened the house, swapping the house keys with my car keys and off we went. It was a rocky start, made OK by Gisi's unflappable help, Marc's kind reaction to my mistake, the upstairs neighbor's availability, and it all turning out OK. Uber to JFK, easy, through security, easy, and then we waited. As we sat across from our gate, Marc and I had a very brief conversation about not forgetting the small backpack he was carrying in addition to the big one, and I said I'll remind you honey.
JetBlue boarded strangely -- people with window seats in first (Marc's ticket), then middle seat passengers, then aisle passengers (my ticket), so off Marc went. When I finally boarded and approached my seat, the steward pointed at me and said, "Is that the bookbag?" I had no idea what was going on, as I put my backpack in the overhead compartment. Marc had messaged me but I hadn't seen it and I was just on board already, anyway: he'd accidentally left the small backpack where we had been sitting, and since it was an international flight, they wouldn't let him leave the plane. As we sat there trying to remember what was in the small backpack, kind of stressing over it, a JetBlue person finally returned -- they'd found it, and it seemed to have everything in it.
So by the time the plane took off, we'd been kind of stumbling forward and everything had turned out ok. I kept secret my anxiety that the plane would crash or something, since it had been a bumpy getting-there, but it all worked out just fine. Even though we don't usually sit together on our around-the-world flights, so we both get window seats, I missed Marc during the 5-ish hour flight, and kept glancing at him across the GIANT dude sitting between us. We got to our giant, dated, conference-ready hotel, ate the sandwiches Marc had packed, so good since it was almost midnight by that point, and fell asleep.
The breakfast was pretty bad, and we took a walk to kill some time because checkout was at noon, Antigua was about an hour away, and we weren't supposed to be able to check in our hotel until three. Guatamala City doesn't really have anything to recommend it: a plethora of American fast food places and other chains, like Office Depot, very little charm, at least in the area where we were, and lots of traffic. Meh. Big meh.
We got an Uber to Antigua, and sat through some pretty miserable traffic with the car windows cracked and the smell of gas and diesel fumes all around us, to the point that Marc needed to put on a mask because the air was causing him a lot of discomfort.
The post title completely leaves out Guatamala City, because the getting-here and Antigua are the parts I'll care to remember in any detail. Next post, the utter glory that is Antigua, and our tremendous traveler's luck in timing.
