Come on out. Oh, the weather outside is weather...

Before I tell you about getting home from Guatemala, which is where the real stories lie, I've got to tell you how we got to Guatemala. Because that was super-fun as well.

P.S. This is going to be long, so I'm going to interject some more pictures into the mix, just to break up the long rambling. Two birds, one stone.

So, we packed all of our tools and gifts for the orphans and various other things into several zillion bags to be checked. We ignored the 50 pound weight limit, because we could just pay a little bit of an overage charge. Until we got to the airport the requisite two hours early and were told under no circumstances were we bringing anything over 50 pounds. And the lady wasn't even going to discuss it. That also included the ginormous solar panels we were going to install down there. Let's not even really discuss the solar panels.

We frantically repackaged everything. My bag started out weighing 35.5 pounds (I can pack it sista), but after the addition of several spanish bibles, spirals, and packages of notebook paper, it weighed 50.5 pounds, but the guy accepted it anyways. Thank goodness, or I would have had to stuff a couple of pair of underwear in my carry on to balance it out. As it was I had to call the momma back to the airport to bring us more bags for some more of the stuff.

After that hurdle was done, we got all the bags checked, leaving us about 20 minutes to get through security and board our plane. Only, when we got there, the screen said "delayed." Oh the implications that word had.

See, we were flying to Houston, and then flying to Guatemala. But there was a storm in Houston. So the plane that was supposed to take us to Houston hadn't exactly left Houston yet. Now, when our person booked our flight, she left us a nifty one hour layover in Houston. You can see where this is going. We were more than likely going to miss our connection. And the next one was on the following Tuesday.

Now, in Continental's defense, they chose this point to start using their powers for good instead of evil, as they had before in the whole no-luggage-over-50-pounds fiasco. The agent was worried that we would get stranded in Houston for three days, so she was calling up the Houston people and using her I'm-not-going-to-argue-with-you-you're-just-going-to-do-what-I-said strategy to get the whole plane to wait....um, two hours on the tarmac for us. Wow.

The funny thing in all of this was that I was pretty much elected to do all of the discussing of plans with her, as two of the men in charge had been deeply involved in the luggage fiasco, and I can come off a little more pleasantly. So, when we got on the plane, and were told that the Guatemala plane was waiting for us if we hurried. To a completely different terminal. I loudly announced this to the person in the back of the plane, so everyone would know that we needed to get off the plane in a hurry. And we did.

The airline had those lovely little speedy carts waiting for us, and sped us over to the other terminal, where we boarded the plane to face the other disgruntled passengers. We got to Guatemala with most of our luggage. Unfortunately, one of our personal bags, that of our friendly teenager from Oklahoma that went with us.

But that was all considered easy peasy compared to this past Saturday's travel. That's another post entirely.

I'll end with a little prize for Abby: