As we were driving to the airport I was just sitting in the back of the car thinking about how hard it was going to be to get the huge bag strapped onto the top of our Honda Accord on to the plane. What was in the gigantic sack was to be know to the air line people as a “surf ski”. However it was a small Liquid logic Kayak packed full of paddling gear, paddles and camping equipment that would last me a month and a half in Chile.
We pulled up to the American Airlines Terminal at Reagan International Airport in Washington DC . The airport is only about 30 minutes from where I live in Fairfax VA. My dad helped me take the 6 foot long 70 pound “surf ski” off of the roof and place it on the sidewalk. My Mom grabbed the large orange waterproof bills-bag from the trunk and I pulled out my Black pelican suit case and dark red backpack. I threw the backpack over my shoulder and my father and I carried the boat in as my mom followed up with the bills-bag and my suit case.
After wandering in confusion for a few minutes we finally found where we had to be. My mother and I kept track of the bags while my dad drove off to park the car. Once we were in the right place we waited for a few minutes and my father came back just as we where called up to the bag check. We weighted both bags, the man behind the counter took my orange bills bag and told us to go take the massive bag over to the oversized luggage check. The men took the bag with no complaint, My parents and I could take a sigh of relief.
We walked over to the gate security with my backpack and my black pelican brief case. There was a loving goodbye and a long hug from each my mother and father and then I was off. I made it through security without a hitch and continued on towards my gate. I had a little while to wait before the plane boarded. Finally my class was called and I boarded the plane. I got the window seat and luckily there was only two people and three seats in my row, so I had a ton of room. My plan was to get some reading done on the 3 hour flight to Texas, it turns out however that I was quite tired. After I watched the ground get farther and farther away, I passed out. When I woke up the ground was coming up quite fast, we were prepared to land in Dallas Texas.
I tumbled off the plane with all my stuff, however as soon as I was off the plane I was lost. After 15 minutes of wandering and trying to figure out where I had to go to meet the rest of the group and get on my plane to chile, I finally decided to call one of my friends I would be flying with. The phone rang uselessly and so I gave and decided I would just try to go and find it my way, by wandering aimlessly. Thankfully, a few minutes into my aimless wandering my phone started ringing. I picked up, “yo, whats up, wheres the gate?” She told me she was with another one of our friends and said that the gate was at B37. So I ran up some escalators got on a small commuter train that would take me to terminal B and started walking towards gate 37. I saw them from about 100 yards away however they were several gates before gate 37 and walking towards me. It turned out that our friend has read his seat number and thought it was the gate.
We called one of our teachers and found out that it was actually terminal D, so we ran up the escalators and hoped on the train again. We made it to terminal D and just wandered around, we had several hours before our flight. We caught up with the rest of our group and just hung out for a while. Then close to 8 we headed over to our gate and boarded the plane. Throughout the 9 hour flight I went back and forth between reading my book for English and sleeping. It was much more crowded on this flight but it still wasn’t horrible. We spent the entire night in the plane, we took off at 9 and landed around 8 in the morning in Santiago. Watching the tremendous mountains go by as we flew over them is one of the cooler things I have seen in a plane. The huge ridges of earth stretched as far as the eye could see, those were the Andes mountains. I was sitting next to a Chilean who explained that sometimes from the plane you could see the pacific ocean to our right, the Andes under us, and Argentina to our left. We landed, got our bags without a hitch, though my “surf ski” had been searched and made it to our cars. I was tired, but there was still so much more to see.
