So we ended up leaving the house later than we planned because I was busy trying to finish some things. The walk to BART, the BART ride and the bus from BART to the San Francisco Airport were uneventful. At the ticket counter, we had a brief scare as the person was unable to find my information. It turned out that I still needed to be ticketed. We noticed the extra time it took for the person to enter in information from our passports (thanks TSA CAPPS and 9/11).
The person at security asked if I wanted to go to a different line with our daughter while Margarita went in a different line. That sounded odd, so I checked the boarding passes and sure enough, Margarita´s boarding pass was marked with the checkerboard pattern and a bunch of s´s at the bottom indicating that she had been flagged for additional screening. Now, because I was with her, we were both given the perpetrator treatment (arms and legs spread, pat-down, etc) while our luggage was hand-inspected. One of Michaela´s toys had begun to vibrate, and this seemed to greatly concern one of the TSA personnel. They did not, however, give the perp treatment to our daughter. Lesson: If you´re in a group and one of you gets flagged, split up so that you don´t all have to be subjected to extra screening. Also, if you have bad intentions, leave everything on the child. We arrived at the gate just as boarding for the flight to Miami started.
The five-hour flight to Miami as a joy. Michaela slept for the first hour of the flight and was extremely contented and playful for the rest of the flight. However, we knew the next flight was about nine hours and we both had some anxiety about it.
The boarding passes for the Buenos Aires flight had us sitting five rows apart. Margarita was quite pleased when I was able to get them changed so that not only were we sitting next to each other, we had an extra seat so that we could spread out with Michaela and get comfortable.
The flight started out at nearly midnight (felt like about 9pm to us). For the first hour or so of the flight, Michaela was fine. But as we tried to go to sleep, she kept waking up and could not seem to stay asleep for about more than an hour. We both struggled as we passed Michaela back and forth - and sometimes to the empty seat - as we tried to get her and us to sleep. Margarita took over most of the night as I had much less sleep to go on.
We had brought quite a lot of snacks and toys for Michaela and realized when we arrived in Argentina that we could have saved some space by bring less toys and by bringing less snacks (but with a bit of variety).
Posted by mike at May 2, 2003 05:43 PM