I still don’t think it’s fully hit me that in just over 7 hours I’ll be in Ecuador. I know it in my head, and clearly I’ve been planning for this for weeks, but it just continues to be a surreal kind of day.
Maybe it’s the lack of sleep. I always know that I’ll be unable to sleep the night before a big travel day like this, so I’m just in the habit of staying up. It’s part of my ritual to go to Wal-Mart at 1:00am for any last things I’ll need, and then to just stay awake cramming my luggage full of food and clothes and my phone full of movies. I slept from about 3-4 am, and then maybe twenty minutes in the car, and not at all on the first flight. So I’ll admit to being just slightly loopy at this point in the day.
Among the loopy things I’ve done today, despite how I like to brag what an expert traveller I am, I realized at the Norfolk airport that they didn’t print a boarding pass for my second flight. And I just didn’t worry about it. But I didn’t think about the fact that I ALWAYS have to go through security a second time in Miami and that I’d need it. Fortunately, when I got here I just pulled up the mobile version on my iPhone and cruised on through. Unfortunately, my terminal didn’t have a TSA agent with a scanner, so I had to trek back up a concourse and convince another TSA agent that I really did know where I was going once he let me through the checkpoint.
While I’m on that train of thought though, Miami seriously needs to connect concourses D and J in some kind of better way than what they’ve got. Because EVERY time I’m here I go from Concourse D to Concourse J. Every time. And every time, I have to leave the secure area, walk 7.2 Bajillion miles (that’s 11.58 Bajillion kilometers) and then go through security again. This time I was glad that construction didn’t detour me outside, but not so happy about the Dr. Pepper I bought in the airport and then forgot was in my book bag (the TSA wasn’t really happy about that either… but I made it through after several minutes enduring yelling, lecturing, grumpy faces and finger wagging).
So now I’m finally sitting at my gate, trying to decide if I should stay awake for the two hours I have left to kill. I’m excited about seeing all of my friends in Quito, about working for Youth World again for a couple weeks, about hosting a team and serving God in Shandia. But like I said, it’s just surreal. 12 hours ago I was in Wal-Mart in Elizabeth City. And here I am in a city that seems like a foreign country, getting ready to board an international flight to a foreign country that feels like home.
Most of the time I have a point. Not today. But that’s where my mind is right now.
