... Hello?... Is this thing still on?

Today was probably the least eventful of the trip, at least until about 10:00 in Dallas. I’ll get there, though.

After some finishing touches, I sat on my lawn, packed and waiting for my ride to Salt Lake. The Internet at our place had just given out (meaning all our neighbor’s Internet connections died), and I was just asked to give up the most convenient parking spot, so it ended up being the perfect time to leave. We five riding together crammed into Tyler’s truck, then picked up Natalie and Tyler’s mom and crammed into Tyler’s mom’s Expedition with our luggage. We said a grateful goodbye to our taxi and spent the next couple hours getting checked in and ready for our flight to Dallas.

As we flew over Utah, I tried to figure out where we were as we were over it, but geography is not that easy when you don’t have the lines to mark the boundaries. But I gave up over what I thought was Colorado (but in all honesty, it probably wasn’t even close to Colorado).

The lady I sat next to didn’t speak English, so I didn’t have much of a conversation with her besides telling her I sat next to her. She actually ended up on our same flight to Santiago.

As we were over New Mexico (they have lines there), there was a huge storm cloud. Imagine driving through Nebraska, flat and uneventful. That is how the horizon looks normally. But the clouds we flew past had so much dimension. The spectacular formations resembles nebulas, measured in miles instead of light-years, with pillars shooting from the enormous wall that spanned from the bottom of sight to top. Then it suddenly ended, like a drop-off in the ocean.

We had three hours to kill in Dallas. I had a LOADED baked potato, which I think will last me the rest of this three-hour flight. We toured the D terminal, which is actually fairly large, but it still didn’t kill much time. The stores were heartily over-priced, but our group made the wait fun.

Now, we are sitting on the plane to Santiago, as the plain sits waiting at the airport. We have been on for about an hour and a half, with our takeoff time an hour behind us. The pilot said there was a piece that needed to get fixed, and the maintenance people were lethargic in responding, so we have yet to undock from the terminal. I was hoping to spend this hour in the air, but I guess I’ll just call this an 11-hour flight.