A Rough Start

To fill you in from the last post, we had a Brazilian vacation planned from the 22nd to the 31st. We had been anticipating this holiday for months. Carl's brother, sister-in-law and nephew were coming from Canada to visit friends and family in Brazil and we had planned to meet them there. It was going to be an opportunity to meet Joao's family and friends, plus spend 4 glorious days at the beach.

The only down-part to this vacation is that in order to save $$ we had to book a flight leaving at 4 a.m. In my mind it would be a little tricky, but totally doable. Our kids can handle a lot and we can handle almost as much!

On Thursday night, we had our bags packed, our kids showered and in bed, schedules left for the support staff, garbage taken out. All we had to do was sleep a few hours and then get up in the middle of the night

So at 1:30 a.m., Carl woke us all up, we called out taxi, loaded our bags and headed to the airport. No one was whimpering or fussing because of the hour, the kids were so excited to be off to Brazil.

No whimpering, yet.....

When we got to the airport, waited in the line until our turn, we were given the most dreadful news. We were told that our connecting flight was canceled and the next flight out of Sao Paolo was full. We were re-booked for the next day.

??!!!!!!

Seriously, I thought this was a joke. But no, it was too awful to be a joke. Apparently the airline had to make a change and notified the travel agent. We had heard nothing from our travel agent! They told us to call him and find out what was going on. It was 3 in the morning?! Should we re-book, could we? What were our options?

Once we realized that there was no way to get to Brazil that night without spending another $1000, we had to resign ourselves that our vacation would be delayed for another 24 hours. I was disappointed beyond words. At that point, we explained it to the kids, who immediately started to cry and then howl, thinking the vacation had been canceled. Oh, let the hearts of those responsible break at the sound of those weeping children!

So we got back home, not sure what to do except sleep. Carl called the travel agent and in a few hours found out that he in fact was responsible for not notifying us. He was very sorry and thought that offering to pay for our taxi ($7) one way would make things better. Maybe I was really tired, but that puny offer just infuriated me!

We headed back to bed, but at 10 a.m. when we all woke up, we were wondering what to do. See, our office was having meetings all day on the yard and all the workers were here. We couldn't really stay at home and not go. I didn't really want to go to the meetings, especially when we had told everyone that we were going to be gone. There was no food in the house and to leave for the day and come back, how would that work when the kids needed to sleep somewhere? We decided to call a hotel and take our stuff and just start our vacation here in Santa Cruz.

It was a good day, but not as good as a day in Brazil would have been. We swam in the pool, ate well, slept a bit in the evening, and got up once again at 1:30 a.m. with the kids to head to the airport. This time Joel kept asking every 10 minutes, "Are you sure we're going this time?".

Once we arrived at the airport, the same agents were there and many gave us sincere looks of apology. One gave us a tease and said, "You're flight is tomorrow!". He quickly said he was joking and we laughed. It's easy to joke when you know you aren't responsible!

Yes. We finally got on our flight and the kids slept the three hours to Sao Paolo. We had about 1 hour to spend before getting on our airplane to Curitiba. The flight was smooth, Asha puked, but in the sink in the bathroom (that's my girl!) and when we got there, the kids were almost frothing at the mouth to see Joao and Caroline and Lucas.

Our vacation had officially started.