We're Coming Home

Today's whirlwind just kept on going after we arrived back at the hotel. I interrupted my lunch to call our U.S. travel agent and see if we could rearrange our travel plans to return on September 4th or 5th. He emailed me back soon after and said that, because we were adopting, we could change our flight plans on Avianca (the Colombian airline flying from Bogota to LAX) with no fee for the change. To do it, however, we had to go to an Avianca office here in Bogota.

We called Martha and she directed us to an Avianca office located in the mall that is a 10-minute walk from our hotel. Martha offered to serve as a translator over the phone if we needed her help. We walked into the Avianca office and almost immediately it was our turn at the window. I feel sorry for the poor gal who helped us because my Spanish sounds like a three-year old trying to talk - tenses are wrong; nouns, adjectives, and verbs are all used incorrectly; vocabulary is limited. Fortunately, she understood what I was trying to get across - we wanted to leave on September 4th rather than September 9th.

Unfortunately, we ran into a sticky problem - Avianca had seats to offer us, but our flight from LAX to Reno did not (that flight was on Alaska Airlines, not Avianca). To top it off, they could only make the change with no fee if the new flight had seats available that were the same "class" as ours, and they only had three seats in the same class (we needed five). While the agent spent a lot of time on the phone, we were trying to plan how we would do this. Maybe three of us could go on the 4th with the other two following on the 5th. Maybe we'd have to stay until the 9th. Maybe we'd just fly to LA and try to figure out how to get home from there. We didn't much like any of the alternatves.

After a long while, the agent said they found a flight from LAX to Reno that had seats for us in the same class. It would mean a 12-hour layover in LAX, but they could make the change for us. Alaska Airlines would charge us for the change, but it was still much less than five more nights in Bogota. The agent made the arrangements for us and we will be on our way home on the 4th, arriving in Reno at 7:15 PM.

As to what happened to allow the five of us to change our Avianca flights (even though there were only three available seats in the same class) I do not know. But I think that the long phone call by the agent may have had something to do with it. I didn't get her name, but I am so thankful for her patience and her help in dealing with us. Once again, the Lord has blessed us and we are praising Him.

Tonight I told Yamile we were traveling at 1:30 AM on the 4th (meaning we're leaving the hotel at 10 PM tomorrow night). She was very excited to hear the news, flashed her heart-warming smile, and gave me a big hug. Even twelve hours in LAX did not dim her spirits. We're coming home.