Atticus Steps

Atticus took about two steps unaided yesterday. It was to no big fanfare. He just needed to get around my knee. He let go of the sofa and stepped one, two and then put his hand back on the sofa as if it were no big deal. He did this a couple of more times yesterday for Tamara and for Marty. I would not say he is walking now because he still has not repeated that feat as of today.

Just another milestone.

Adrienne has been sick with vomiting and diarrhea. We have been giving her pediatric electrolyte formula and suppositories that are supposed to settle her stomach.

Trip From Hell

Sometimes the best laid plans just don’t work out… especially if it involves air travel….and most especially if that air travel is in Central America. The trip I had planned was a rather simple one. I was to leave Charlotte on Monday and fly to Guatemala City via Dallas on American and then on to San Pedro Sula via Taca and then back home to Charlotte via Miami on American. The trip was to attend a trade show in Guatemala City and our factory in Hondruas.

It just so happened that a particularly nasty nor’easter was in the process of wrecking its way through the northeast. One of my employees was supposed to catch a flight out of Charlotte the same morning of the same Monday that I was to leave.

He never made it through security. The airport was so jammed with delayed and stranded travelers that he ended up driving from Charlotte to Michigan. Charlotte is a USAirways hub and he was supposed to be flying USAirways. Fortunately for me (or possibly unfortunately) my flight was on American and the plane was arriving from Dallas so they did not have the same issues with delays and the airport was somewhat calm when I arrived. The lines for USAirways check in were insane but the American check in was a breeze.

So I sat at the gate and waited. The flight arriving from Dallas was a little late in getting to the gate and we departed about ten minutes late. I didn’t think much about it even though I only had a forty minute layover in Dallas before I was to catch my flight to Guatemala.

So we landed in Dallas and taxied to the gate. We stopped on the tarmac and the pilot announced that our gate was still occupied by the previous flight and that we were going to have to wait until the plane cleared out. At this point I still had about thirty minutes before my flight left for Guatemala.

Twenty minutes later we were still sitting on the tarmac waiting for the gate. I got on the phone and called American Airways who informed me that the flight to Guatemala was delayed and that there was still a chance that I could make that flight. If not they were going to send me Miami on a flight that left in another hour.

So I ran off the plane. I ran through the terminal, I ran to the shuttle train to get to the D gate from our A gate. I ran off the shuttle to the gate but I already knew that I had missed the flight.

The nice woman at the gate booked me on the 7:00 flight to Miami and then on a noon flight to Guatemala the next day. After I get my boarding pass from her I go to the departure status monitors to see that the flight to Miami is delayed by two hours- it departed at 9:15 pm and arrived in Miami at 12:55 am. Great!!

So to Miami I went.

Off the plane in Miami I went to the first available American Airlines agent who booked me a hotel room at the downtown Radisson along with vouchers for transportation to the hotel and back and room and food. I got to the Radisson about 2:30 am.

I didn’t sleep too much and got up about 8:00 am and enjoyed the excellent breakfast buffet at the Radisson. I tried not to stuff myself with foods that cause premature death.

I got back to the airport and boarded my flight without any incident. The two and a half hours to Guatemala went smoothly and getting though customs and immigration was a breeze in Guatemala. I was surprised that I didn’t even have to wait on the shuttle to take me to the Grand Tikal Hotel more than thirty minutes.

I met Robert at the hotel and immediately got some food at one of the restaurants in the Hotel. It was kind of like an upscale Asian Stir Fry. I had a grilled ostrich filled that was really good. Internet access was $10 per day and you had to take your laptop to the geek wannabes and they changed the TCP/IP settings in your computer so you could get access so I just used Robert’s computer since he had already been through that exercise.

I failed to print out the one file that I needed to take to the show that outlaid the specification of all the fabric that I was wanting to source in Central America. So I went to the business center in the hotel to print out the legal sized sheet to give to prospective suppliers. After twenty minutes of the business center employees trying to get one of their computers to print out the very simple legal landscape document we gave up and hit the show.

First we met Karen Facusse with Rio Lindo in Tegucigalpa. They might be able to make some of our lighter fabrics. Then we met with another company based in Guatemala who believe that they can do all of our fabrics. I can’t recall the company’s name and I am too lazy to look for their business cards.

The hotel where we stayed called Gran Tikal Futura is a large hotel with a very open and spacious lobby that is 10 stories high all enclosed from the elements. The elevators ascend inside this large space. The Hotel is attached to two malls and the exposition center where the show took place. The expo center was smaller than most of the ones I have been to in the US but for us it seems that it can be a very successful show.

Robert and I walked across the elevated walkway past the beggars and candy vendors to go to a steakhouse called La Estancia. I had steak in wine sauce and it was pretty damn good. That blew my red meat for the week.

The next day we hit the show again and talked with a company that can make our knit wrists for us in Guatemala. That could be promising as well. We finally caught the shuttle back to the airport about 3:30 pm for our 5:30 flight to San Pedro Sula. The line at the Taca counter in the airport in Guatemala was the posterchild for inefficiency and chaos. We did eventually get checked in and to the gate.

We boarded the ATR dual turboprop plane for the uneventful one hour flight in a steambath to San Pedro Sula. After we landed in San Pedro Sula it really started to get interesting.

Robert breezed through immigration without incident. When I handed my passport to the young immigration official, he looked closely at my expiration date and said “no… tres meses.” He called over his supervisor who took me aside and started to explain something to me in Spanish. I began to piece it together when Robert walked within sight and I called him over to help translate. In retrospect, this was a very large mistake.

The immigration supervisor began to explain to Robert that Honduras does not allow travelers into its country if their passport expires within three months. My passport expires July 14, 2007 and today was April 18, 2007. Robert, being Robert, got very stern in his tone of voice and said a bunch of stuff to the immigration supervisor in Spanish which I could not follow. The immigration supervisor told us that I would have to stay overnight in a motel and then go directly back from whence I came the next day and subsequently confiscated my passport and boarding pass

Then I look over at one of the two baggage claim carousels and see a total of three pieces of luggage that came off the plane. Twenty minutes later after all passengers from the small plane had gotten through immigration and the carousel had been stopped we realized that all the passengers baggage did not make the flight with us from Guatemala. Yes that is right, there were only three pieces of luggage on the flight with about forty passengers. Wouldn’t you think that the airline employees loading the plane in Guatemala would notice that something was wrong when there were forty passengers and only three pieces of luggage to load on the plane?

So we wait in line again. While waiting in line I recognized someone. It was Russ Pierce. He was on the flight with me. He had set up our first production control software and pretty much raped us for about $40,000. Regardless, I am still very cordial to him when I see him (I had also run into him on a flight to Mexico City a year ago) even though he is still kind of an asshole.

Robert filled out all the paperwork for tracking the lost luggage and the lady who was helping trace the bags called her supervisor to come talk to me about my situation. While we were waiting to fill out the paperwork Robert’s wife Sara called and robert explained what was going on. She then called Taca to find out what was happening. Sara called Robert back and told him that the representative she talked to at Taca informed her that the immigration supervisor was going to let me in the country but then Robert “yelled’ at him and pissed him off so he retaliated by enforcing the law.

Robert’s take on the situation is that he did not yell at the immigration supervisor but that the immigration supervisor was trying to extort some money from me in the form of a bribe and since we did not offer any money, he enforced the law. I believe this could be true however Robert certainly did not help the situation with the tone of voice and the attitude he gave the immigration supervisor. I believe that if Robert had been nice and cordial to the immigration supervisor I would have been allowed into the country even though I was four days past the official deadline.

When Sara told Robert this, he certainly yelled at her. Robert has this problem. He leads me to believe that thinks everyone but him is an idiot and that they need to be controlled. That is how he runs his factory. But it really fucks thing up in situations like this. I really needed to be able to speak Spanish during this situation.

The Taca supervisor soon arrived. He was a very young man by the name of David who spoke very good English. I explained to him my situation and how I was going to miss my meetings the next day and how I felt that Taca Airlines was responsible because they did not check my passport expiration date.

So he told me that he would arrange for me to stay in a hotel and that Taca would pay for it. He said that he was very busy at the check in and would try to get a “monitor” from immigration so I could leave the airport. Apparently this monitor was to shadow me so I would not skip out and flee without my passport.

Robert took the paperwork for reclaiming the bags and left the airport with his wife Sara at about 7:30. He gave me his cell phone to use. Robert and Sara went home where Robert dropped off Sara, got some gas, got some food and returned to the airport.

In the meantime our bags had been rerouted through San Salvador and arrived at about 8:30. Robert arrived with the food about 9:00 and while I was eating my “chicken whopper” (yuck) David arrived with my monitor and explained to me that he had gotten a room for me at the Banana Inn in La Lima and had booked a flight for be back to Guatemala. I requested for him to check at the Gran Hotel Sula where I had my reservations. He called but said they had given away my reservation to someone else and that the Intercontinental was full.

Taca paid for the taxi to take my monitor and me to the Banana Inn. The monitor’s name was Roberto and he was a fresh-faced young kid who spoke pretty broken English. Robert followed us to the hotel which is in the Zona Americana in La Lima, only a five minute drive from the airport. By the time we got to the Banana Inn it was about 9:45. I got settled into the room and Robert and I talked business. I gave him the $200 thermostats and samples that were sent with me. Robert took off and I had to call him back once to give him machine parts. I stayed up and watched some stupid movie about this dude named Blade who hunted and killed vampires. I think Blade was Wesley Snipes.

The Banana Inn did have wireless internet for free!

I stayed up until about 1:00 am so I really didn’t get much sleep. We went back to the airport at 5:15 so I could try to catch the American flight back to the US of A. Roberto escorted me back via Taca paid Taxi to the airport where I waited in another line to try to get my ticket changed. After paying the $110 fee they changed my flight and gave me a boarding pass on the 7:00 am American flight to Miami.

After checking my bags, my escort Roberto handed over my passport and walked me to the area where you go upstairs to pay $33 for the privilege of leaving Honduras. He then started telling me something about a Hotel security fee that had not been paid. He really wasn’t making much sense with his poor English. What I understood him saying was that the Hotel was charging me a $50 security fee and that I needed to pay him.

I informed him that it was Taca’s fault that I had to leave the country early and that they were paying for all my expenses during my brief stay in Honduras. He backed down and said that it was ok and that he would go talk to the Taca supervisor.

That is how it works in Central America. The culture is one of corruption and bribery. There was not security fee. Roberto just wanted me to give him $50. Thank goodness I haven’t run into a lot of that in business.

Maybe I should look on the bright side of things. I guess Roberto could have taken me somewhere and said that I wasn’t going anywhere until I coughed up the money. I could have had to go back to Guatemala and then fend for myself getting back to the US. It cold have been worse.