- The Truth
- October 3, 2005: Leaving The Compound
- October 4, 2005: Missing the boat, or rather plane
- October 11, 2005: The first call
- October 13, 2005: Change of plans
- October 14 - 26: Florida
- October 27, 2005: The Surprise
We've been planning to head to Tennessee for my father's 70th birthday since early in this year. My sisters and I figured our present would be us showing up. My mother and all of our friends knew that we were headed to the States in October/November - everyone that we talked to except my father knew. So the lies started long ago. When we were here in June, we kept talking about our next trip home being in January, knowing that it would, in fact, be in October. We knew that we would have to be creative with updating the website, telling Dad where we were, what our plans were, etc. So the lies began. Now that it's all our, here's the truth. Back to the top.
October 3, 2005: Leaving The Compound
Since we put the dinghy up on the deck last night, we asked the panga
drivers from The Compound to pick us up at the boat at 5:45 am so that
we could be on shore when the taxi came to pick us up at 6 am. Of course
it was raining as it had been the last three days. But the rains couldn't
dampen our spirits. ROAD TRIP! And, I guess, AIR TRIP!, too.
By 6:30 it was apparent that the taxi driver had either a)forgotten about us, b)was really, really late, c)was abducted by aliens or, d) forgot to get dressed and had to go home to get his clothes. We called him and found out that he was still sleeping. He decided that because it had been raining so much that the roads out of The Compound would be impassable and therefore we wouldn't be leaving. We explained that we were in fact leaving, did in fact need a ride, and could he please in fact come to get us. He said he'd be there within 30 minutes. That would give us plenty of time to make the 8 am Especial bus to Santa Miguel. You see, we had a long day ahead of us. We were trying to take 4 buses, a border crossing to make it to the Soto Cano military base in Honduras by 5 pm. This would allow us to be there in time to get a room for the night on base. That would make it easier for us on Tuesday morning to have breakfast and get to the passenger terminal by 8:30 am.
So. Back to our sleepy driver. An hour and 10 minutes later he shows up. Not possible any longer to make our 7 or 8 am Especial bus to San Miguel. We wanted an Especial because it takes much less time. It's a direct bus, not stopping all along the route to pick up and drop off. We finally made it to the bus station at 8:15 and get on a bus leaving immediately. Instead of being an hour trip, it's an hour and a half. We probably won't make it to the base in time to get on and get a bed tonight. We're still okay. We'll just have to change our plans. Our lives in the past year have been all about changing plans on the go.
Because we now have our Central America travel guide, we are able to
take a different, more direct and much cheaper route. The bus from San
Salvador to Tegucigalpa that we tried last trip was much more expensive,
but more importantly, it's not possible to make the trip without getting
a hotel room two nights because of the bus schedule. So this time, we're
taking chicken buses the whole way.
Taxi from The Compound to Usulutan - 40 minutes (we had to take a bit
of a detour because of a downed tree.)
Bus from Usulutan to San Miguel: 1 ½ hours, $1.70 each
Bus from San Miguel to the border: 1 ½ hours, $3.50 each
Border crossing: 100 yards walk, $6 border fee each
Bus from border to Tegucigalpa: 4 hours, 138 lempiras (approx. $7.66 USD
each). We had to buy three tickets because we weren't willing to let go
of our bags to be put in the back of the bus where they wouldn't fit in
the overhead luggage rack. We just paid the for the extra seat and peace
of mind)
Bus from Tegucigalpa to Comayagua: 1 ½ hours, $4 USD (we were almost
out of lempiras because of our extra bus ticket. No ATM close. The ticket
lady was willing to take $5 USD for the tickets. We had 4 bills and 4
quarters. She didn't want the quarters so accepted only $4 USD for the
two tickets.)
Hotel stay in Comayagua on Monday night: 300 lempira/$16.66 USD
Some unusual things we saw along the way… The bus into Tegucigalpa had windshield wipers, but didn't turn them on at all. Why, might you ask is that so unusual? Because it was RAINING. HARD. But why turn them on? It's just rain. And, of course the defrost doesn't work. Rain on the outside, rags wiping off the inside. It just makes it interesting, right?
Somewhere along this trip the "Omg Wag Tg" was born. The driver had a habit of leaning hard on the brakes, sliding a bit on the slippery roads stopping to pick up passengers. Abe and I would look at each other and say, "Omg Wag TG!" Oh my god, we're going to die!!!!! We didn't want to offend any of the locals that might speak English. We speak very quickly, using slang when we can when we need to not offend. Who knows if it works. So far we haven't been smacked so I guess we're okay.
On this same leg, we stopped with an hour to go for a pit stop. I have to tell you, this is the first time I've flushed a toilet with a paint bucket full of water. I'm glad there were other ladies in front of me to show me the routine. Get your paint bucket from the floor. Fill it from the large bin of water outside the stalls. Toss it in. No need for a handle to flush. The water just runs out the pipes. Easy and simple. The toilets had no lids on the tanks. I'm sure they would have bought toilets without the tanks if possible. They're not used, why pay for them?
On the leg to Comayagua we saw a new way for hitching a ride. Anyone who has seen Back to the Future knows you can hang onto a bumper of a moving vehicle to hitch a ride. Abe and I have always seen hitchers hanging on with a hand. This new hitcher riding a bike had hooked a foot under a bus bumper. Nice! Gives you steering control with both hands on the handle bar. Nice easy ride up the hill! Back to the top.
October 4, 2005: Missing the boat, or rather
plane
Taxi from Comayagua to Soto Cano base: 10 minutes, quoted at 70 lempiras.
However, when we paid the guy, "he didn't have change" (yeah,
right) for 100 lempira bill. (We'd found an ATM in Comayagua on Monday
night.) He only had 15 lempira, so we ended up paying 85 lempira for the
ride or $4.72 USD. (For those wondering, about 18 lempira to $1 USD).
Breakfast in the mess hall, on our way to the passenger terminal: $3.60
USD. Yummy. Really!
Finding out that the weekly plane wasn't coming at all: Not so priceless.
Rumor on the base has it that there are no planes (perhaps because of hurricane relief, but not sure) available to make the weekly trip. Because we ate breakfast, we just missed a C-12 (a King Air, most liked by us as a good skydiving plane) headed to San Antonia. Doh! Nothing scheduled until next Tuesday's flight to Charleston. At the front gate, the MP said he didn't think a flight was coming in. But when he called the terminal, the lady there said yes, there was a flight. Since we were schlepping our bags, we stopped for breakfast since it was on the way. Lesson learned. Find WHICH flight is going.
But we're okay. Fortunately we were able to get housing for the week. And a letter from the appropriate major allowing us to shop in the PX for the week. If nothing else, we need towels. I had high hopes of finding flip flops for shower shoes, but no luck. Sigh. Barefoot in the shower. Ick. (Not so bad, the showers were very clean. And since there are very few females deployed here, I had the bathrooms all to myself.) Best of all, though, were some really nice, great folks in the IT department who gave us a temporary login so that we could have access to the internet and e-mail for the week. The IT guys are contractors for Harris, the same company my brother-in-law works for. So very nice to take the time to get us set up. And J.B. has some great info for us on what to see in Nicaragua. And Abe got a nice geek fix, talking IT and MCSE (Microsoft stuff for us non-geeks) stuff with other geeks. And I use that term with endearment.
We're in a great place to watch the beginning of the baseball playoffs (please, Atlanta, don't let us down this year. Please.), free housing, great folks around us. It's so nice to meet these guys who serve our country and talk with them. It's my favorite part of being on base. I try to say thanks to each of them for the job they do. And then I feel dorky because it always chokes me up. The older I get, the wussier I get. But we just so appreciate the jobs they do.
Anyway perhaps something unscheduled will appear on the flight line. Maybe we'll get there sooner rather than later. Back to the top.
October 11, 2005: The first call
It's been a fast week. Our Braves lost. Big surprise. No unscheduled flights
appeared. We've kept my sister informed as to where we are and what's
going on. She's forwarding all the information to my Mom's work (she still
works some at the college even though she's retired) e-mail account. This
will keep her in the loop without compromising the birthday surprise.
Now that we're in the States at Charleston, the plan is to fly out west as soon as possible. Our best bet looks to be a flight to McChord AFB near Seattle. This would be great because we could drive to Los Angeles going through Boise to see Abe's son and grandson. I have a friend in Washington it would be also nice to see. Then on the way from Los Angeles to Florida, we could go through San Francisco (Travis AFB has flights to Charleston or Patrick if we get lucky). That's the plan anyway. The flights to McChord aren't scheduled until Wednesday (not too many seats, low likelihood that we'll get on), and Thursday (lots of seats, more likely) so we'll be in Charleston for a day or two.
I knew I would have to make at least one phone call to my folks before we showed up at the house. All this time we've been telling my folks that we couldn't leave El Salvador for further south until the end of October because of weather. Not so much the truth. We couldn't leave because we weren't there! The original plan for leaving the boat for the surprise was to take the boat to Costa Rica or Panama and then head back to the States from there. But with the safety of Barillas Marina, we thought it best to go with where we knew the boat would be safe rather than the uncertainty of what we might find south. So we made up a story that we couldn't leave due to weather.
I'd talked to them from The Compound on Sunday, October 2nd, being as vague as I could. Since we've been using Skype to call, and have good Internet connection here at Barillas, I've been able to talk to my folks about once a week. It's a nice change to have good phone connections, cheap calls. I was talking about once every 2 or 3 weeks from Mexico. But this caused me problems after we left The Compound since there would be 3 weeks before we got to the surprise. I was going to have to lie and lie big.
I figured while we were waiting on flight information to Washington, it would be a good time to get a call in. Just get it over with. The Lie was that we were in Honduras scuba diving. We'd received an e-mail from another cruiser that had been to Roatan, Honduras. We used their information along with our Central America guide to make our lies. Saying that we were leaving The Compound made sense because we'd been talking with my folks about how restless we felt. And we were. It made for a good excuse to leave on a road trip. Also leaving on a road trip meant that we'd be out of touch much more so than usual. It gave us a good excuse to ignore e-mails, not to call as often, etc. It wouldn't be out of the norm for contact to be slower while we were traveling. If I called from the base in Charleston, I would only need to call once again before hitting TN.
I called from the passenger terminal planning on telling stories of the bus ride (which were all true except that I just said that we were heading to a different location than we had really taken. And I was off by a week). I managed the call okay, lying my behind off, sweating like crazy because I was lying to my father. Too bad I didn't have that kind of conscience when I was younger! It would have saved me loads of grief. Abe was laughing at me because I was sweating, telling me I deserved it since I was flat-out lying to my father. I just knew that I had to call before we got to TN or it would look suspicious not calling for 3 weeks. Or worrisome to my folks. The only problem I had in calling from the Passenger Terminal was the announcements over the loudspeaker, calling for all military personnel hoping to catch the hop to Andrews AFB to check in at the counter. During the time in the announcement that Dad was speaking, I covered the mouthpiece, hoping the garble the sound. As soon as he stopped talking, I virtually screamed into the mouthpiece hoping to cover the sound of crisp English being spoken. (Dad said later, that he'd heard the voices and just thought that we were traveling somewhere. English being spoken didn't really register. He says that he trusted me, and didn't really question it. Oh, the guilt!!!).
We rented a cheap car through Priceline ($17 a day for a midsize, name your own price), and got a hotel room. Our first meal was at Hooters where we could watch Houston play St. Louis. I'm pulling for Houston, Abe's pulling for St. Louis. Back to the top.
October 13, 2005: Change of plans
We're just not having any luck heading west. We ended up staying in Charleston
for two nights. On Thursday we learned that all flights to McChord had
been canceled until Sunday or Monday. One popped up at 8 PM on Wednesday
night, but we were in the hotel room by then. It was unscheduled, and
would have had room for us, but we had no idea it was going. That's Space
A flights for you. Even if we can only use them to get to and from the
States, though, we're lucky. But now we have to figure how to get out
to California to see Abe's sisters. We'll figure out what to do when we
get to Florida.
We drove to Florida, excited to be seeing my sister and her family again. Even though it had just been 3 months since we'd seen them, we were anxious to visit again. After all, the theater was finished this time, complete with chairs and candy counter! Back to the top.
October 14 - 26: Florida
The new plan is that From Florida, Abe will fly via Southwest to go visit
his sisters in California. With the prices the way they are, I won't go.
I'm bummed because it's nice to see family, but it's okay. He flew out
on the 24th so we had a nice long visit with the McCowns before we all
split.
We posted to our website while there, and that was when I had my most difficult moment in this whole surprise. We'd gone with the McCowns to Downtown Disney. We went to the Rainforest Cafe which has a jungle theme and gigantic fish tanks. Someone had the bright idea to take pictures of some of the more impressive fish, and to post them to the website as fish that we'd seen while scuba diving. Would that clinch The Lie for Dad? We didn't think that he was suspicious, but I didn't want to be the one to blow it.
After I posted the website, I got an e-mail from Dad saying that the pictures were wonderful and did we use our own camera for that. It looked like a great trip and he hoped we were having fun. I'm not sure why, but I had the biggest attack of guilt from that e-mail.
We all talked at various times with each other, mostly when Dad went into town for lunch. With Lisa and I in the same house, we seemed to be getting twice daily calls from Mom - some ending with a quick whisper, "he's home. Bye!" followed by a click. Jill called and said she couldn't call TN any more because she'd almost given the secret away. "When I get back, we're going to do such and such on the house." Oops. Back from where? "Oh, did I tell you that I was doing some training with the dogs in town all next week, and won't be here much?"
To make matters worse, we had some other surprises that had to be kept. Stacy (my niece) had asked for a guitar from Central America. She'd been playing on the one we brought for Steven in June, and wanted to buy one if we would carry it to the States for her. Since her 13th (I can't believe she's that old!!!) birthday is this March, we thought it would be a nice gift to give her. But since the original plan was to travel for 3 weeks before hitting Florida, we didn't want to carry it all the way from Central America. So we surprised her by taking her to buy the guitar in Orlando. But we had to lie to her telling her how much we'd spent on it (since she was saving her money thinking we were just the pack mules for it). Lisa knew about that. Mom may have too.
And the other surprise (see how confusing it gets?!) was that we were all (except Lisa and Dad) planning a 40th surprise for Lisa's birthday which happens in December. But since we were all going to be together... I was having trouble keeping it all straight as to who knew what when. And what role models we were to be lying to Stacy and Steven's grandfather right in front of them. We kept saying that we had good justification because it was for a surprise and not hurting anyone! Good thing they are old enough to know the difference. (Lisa, just blame it on this if they start lying now!).
We were in Florida just in time to get visited by hurricane Wilma. We had the opportunity to help put up the storm shutters at my sisters. What a process. We helped move everything into the garage including their 16' sailboat. We didn't think Eleytheria would have fit even if we could have removed the mast. The storm passed 100 miles south of us, but we had a couple of hours of hurricane force winds. Good experience for us. And good reinforcement that we do not want to go through that on a boat. It was so nice to be in a nice, air tight, wind tight house. And because of the hurricane on Monday, the toll roads to Orlando were free when I drove Abe on Tuesday morning at 5 am.
I did make one last phone call to Dad while still in Florida. I knew he would expect us to call after we arrived back at the boat after our Scuba trip. I'd told him from Charleston that we expected to be back within a week, to start preparing the boat to leave last week in October for parts south. He was semi-expecting a call. After my guilt-ridden days after posting to the website, I thought the phone call would be difficult. It wasn't too bad. Mom was at work at the library that day, so it was just Dad and me. No Mom to run interference. I called on Skype which is what we use for all our calls now. Skype is a phone system utilizing the Internet We listen and speak through a microphone/headset and can call another computer or a real telephone number. The connections from Barillas to my folks have been great. The connection from Florida to TN was horrid. It was great for purposes of The Lie. Plus, it gave me a good excuse to have the call be short. Mom called Lisa later that day, asking how we had made the connection so bad. Dad told her that we called and that the connection was bad. My responsibility for calling any more was done! Now, just to last to the 27th! Back to the top.
October 27, 2005: The Surprise
The McCowns and I drove to Tennessee on the 26th, needing to make it to
Maryville by 8 PM so that we could pick up Jill (our other sister) at
the airport. She was flying into Knoxville airport at 10:30 PM We decided
on a hotel room that night so that we didn't appear at my folks' house
at midnight, giving Dad a heart attack from burglars that late at night.
With 6 of us in a room, it was tight. And I felt like giggling while lying
there trying to sleep. Just like slumber parties!
We got up early, stopped for pastries (Mom hadn't been able to buy much at the grocery store in preparation for our arrival because it would have tipped off Dad. We were responsible for bringing our own breakfast!), and snuck down the driveway at 8:30 am. We parked in a blind spot of the driveway and slurked around the carport and side of the house. I kept giggling. The kids were better at being quiet than I was!
Mom met us at the door, quieted the dog from barking and told us Dad was still in bed. He'd been up at 5 am because he couldn't sleep, and had finally gone back to bed at 7 or so. Perfect for us to sneak into the house. 7 people stacked outside the bedroom door, giggles, whispers and bursting through the door for a surprise. What a way to wake up. That'll get the adrenaline going!
The first thing we did after breakfast? Cut down a tree that had been
dead for years. No rest for the weary! The rest of October was spent with
all the Brandsborgs together again. Back to the top.
