Friends Scott and Ashley, plus their five children came over to visit Sunday night. I had been hoping to see them again before leaving. Unfortunately, I was supposed to head off to LAX soon. We all played until the last minute, and then I threw everything into two bags, including some clothes that got washed but not fully dried. Grandpa and Mom then drove me to the airport.
Thinking I was late, they simply dropped me at the curb and I jammed to check in. But I wasn't late at all and wished I would've spent a few more minutes with people at home. You never can get those minutes back.
My plane departed LAX at 12:30 am and arrived in Atlanta the next morning. I left there at 10:30 am that Monday and next stopped that night on Sal island of Cape Verde, off the west coast of Africa.
We all remained on the plane while crews were changed and the thing was refueled and a few new passengers boarded. It was supposed to take an hour. It took two. They couldn't get the cargo door shut. So when we landed in Johannesburg, South Africa I was rushing to make my connecting flight. Of course, the baggage took forever to arrive on the carousel, the customs line was long, and I missed it. But it wasn't a big issue because they put me on the next flight to Bloemfontein just two hours later. Also, I was in a good mood because even though that flight from America had been long (maybe 20 hours in the plane) I had been seated next to fascinating people.
This meant a lot because the old man I was next to on the flight to America in December had had breath that could've killed a horse, and he wanted to talk to me the whole time. Even when he wasn't talking, just breathing, I had to hug the window and lift the collar of my shirt to try and filter out the pollutants.
Now, on my way back to Africa, I got seated next to a history professor from Mississippi on his way to deliver a paper at a conference in Pretoria. I got to ask him his opinion on all sorts of subjects, including Jared Diamond's book "Guns, Germs, and Steel". Moreover, the woman sitting behind me was a professor at the University of Botswana. She had just come from visiting her husband who now works at Ohio University, where she also got her doctorate. She was the first person I got to speak Sesotho with. So yeah, that was all a lot better than eating horrid breath for 20 hours like on the flight over. And incidentally, or deliberately I should say, I brushed my teeth twice on that flight back to Africa, so afraid I was going to torture my neighbors as I had once been tortured.
I finally landed in Bloemfontein in the rain. When I last landed in Bloemfontein in November of 2003 it was also in the rain. I liked that. I was picked up by a Peace Corps driver in one of their white Land Cruisers and dropped off in Maseru a few hours later. From Los Angeles on Sunday night to Maseru, Lesotho on Tuesday evening. It was humid but comfortable when I arrived in Maseru and I promptly went to sleep for ten hours.