Albert

My scheduled trips this month have been turns to Belize. Out at 1pm, home at 8pm, the trips are super easy. The ground staff in Belize are great and I've enjoyed getting to know them this month. One agent, Shari, even brought me some toys to donate to the CCA Giving Tree, a local charity I have contributed to and supported this holiday.

It was a nice surprise to have a little boy traveling under the Airline Ambassadors Children's Escort Program, named Albert. I have been participating in this program for 5 years, but have never been working a flight where we had a child being escorted. I am usually the one doing the escorting. This particular flight had one of our First Officer's named Mark escorting little Albert to St. Louis, on behalf of Healing the Children, the same charity that sponsors little Kelin, one of my frequent charges from Honduras.

Albert was making his second trip up to St. Louis to have surgery to correct problems with his leg. He was such good natured kid. I'm hoping his operation is a success.

Chile (Buyer's Remorse forgiven)

I flew a Santiago, Chile trip earlier this month. It was a great crew and we all worked well together, which makes it nice. We were full going down and almost full coming home, but we still had fun and even the passengers were pretty low key for the most part.

You may recall my buyer's remorse from back in August, when I purchased a Moai made of lapis lazuli without realizing how much I actually paid for it, and then succumbed to sticker shock when I figured out I paid $40 for it.

http://ronno1976.blogspot.com/2009/08/buyers-remorse-in-chile.html

I revisited the same gift shop again to purchase a few postcards (I always send one to my friends Bruce and Leslie) and the same clerk, who must not have remembered me tried to convince me (in Spanish) to buy some lapis lazuli. I informed her that I already fell for it once and would not be making that mistake again, explaining that I did not realize I was paying so much for it. To her credit, she apologized and told me she would give me 20% off anything I wanted in the store, so I bought a little dust collector depicting the front of a Chilean wine store, and I got it for about $8! It is now hanging happily in the master bedroom of my house.

The hotel was nicely decorated for the holidays, so we got a great group photo of in front of the Christmas tree before our pick up the evening of our departure.

We arrived at the airport on time and hustled to the wine store to do our shopping. I am a big fan of a local wine called Los Secretos. We got to the wine store about 5 minutes to ten, only to find the proprietor had already lowered the gate half way. When we saw us he gave a smirk and shook his head. For the life of me, I can not understand why a store at a Latin American airport with the majority of the flights departing close to midnight would close at 10pm, and five minutes early at that!

So no wine for me on this trip. My regular trips this month are turns to Belize, where the duty free is so cheap I almost feel like I am robbing them ($7 Absolut Vodka, $13 Bombay Gin), so I guess I should not complain too much.

We had a strange character on the way home who came back and talked our ears off for about an hour about how we had taken an ambien and a half with his two splits of wine at dinner and still was not tired. We finally encouraged him to go have a seat and try to sleep. The next morning when we were serving breakfast, he had no memory of the conversation in the galley. Let that be a lesson not to drink and ambien at the same time.