It’s Colombia not Columbia

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Hola everyone yes I know it’s been a long, long time actually way too long. Not actually how to run a travel blog but you know sometimes you have other things to do besides travel like work. I’m never going to get my travel show “Where are the Woods Wandering to?” it’s still a working title, so don’t judge me. Yes I’m in Colombia, not Columbia, South Carolina or Columbia, Missouri but Colombia in South America. One thing I do know is that Colombians hate when people spell the name of their country wrong. So I’ve been to five continents now, Africa and Antarctica are left but I can pretty confidently say that I probably will never go to Antarctica so Africa is on the travel list.

I’m sitting on a balcony right now in Bocagrande overlooking the Caribbean but getting to this point was an adventure. I’ll start on Friday night, we booked a hotel in San Antonio cause we had an early flight to Miami, American Airlines let us change our flight to Saturday due to Hurricane Dorian, yayyy one more day in Colombia, sounds awesome. Friday night we get to San Antonio and check into the hotel, a few minutes I get a text message saying our flight from San Antonio to Miami has been cancelled. I’m thinking it’s weather related but I call the airline and they say it’s flight crew, that could mean a lot of things, try to stay positive San Antonio is not a bad place to spend a Saturday, so we spend all day on Saturday relaxing and watching college football.

So we try this again on Sunday, flight is scheduled to leave at 545am so we’re up early drive to the airport which is less than 5 minutes away and we’re already checked in. So we drop our bags off at baggage and we got precheck with TSA so no line, just stroll through and head to our gate. Now it’s time to board the plane, we get on and get in our seats, my wife always sits by the window so I’m stuck in the middle, take out my IPad and headphones I have some tv shows dowloaded I’m ready to go. We’re sitting for a while then the pilot announces their doing maintenance on the bathrooms, me and my wife both work in aviation, your supposed to do all checks before you let passengers on the plane, so we sit for about an hour and they announce flight is cancelled and to rebook your flights. Their is only one flight per day from Miami to Cartagena and we’re going to miss it, at this point we think our vacation is ruined and we’re just gonna go home. We call American they put us on another flight to Miami and we have to catch the flight to Cartagena on Monday, while that is going on they announce that our original flight will take off soon so I have to go to the counter to get us put back on this flight. So we get back on our original flight while missing our connection, lets just say we will never fly with American again but we finally get to Miami and they send us to customer service. The lady their was probably the nicest person from American we dealt with during this adventure. They gave us a hotel voucher and meal vouchers to eat with on Sunday and Monday morning. We got our vouchers and new tickets, then went outside to wait on the shuttle to take us to the hotel.

By now we’re exhausted and just wanna rest, so as soon as we got to the hotel we went to the bar cause we needed a drink and some food. We ate then went back to the room and watched the US Open, we left early cause we were concerned about Hurricane Dorian, one of the joys of having your anniversary in September is worrying about hurricanes changing your travel plans and this time it was just the incompetence of an airline. Our flight leaves at 1050 on Monday morning, so we take no chances get to the airport early head thru TSA and then I exchange some money, we eat breakfast and find our gate. We get to the gate and this couple wants to talk to us about what we’re going to do in Cartagena, I watch a lot of movies and it felt like a Hostel moment so I kept it short and my wife avoided talking to them at all. We boarded the plane and they were sitting in front of us and looked back a few times with some weird I wanna kidnap you type of smiles so I put my head down and stared at my Ipad. Two and half hours later we land in Cartagena or should I say 48 hours later, we made it to Colombia and we couldn’t be more relieved. We get off the plane and head to immigration, they have two lines one for foreigners, yes it said foreigners and the other line was for locals. Immigration didn’t take long then we grabbed our bags and got in a taxi, taxi rides in foreign countries are always a treat and this was one of the best. Cab driver with his broken English was very talkative, asked if I liked to party and I said yes, then proceeds to take out a bag of coke and asked do I wanna party? Colombia has gotten a bad reputation from Escobar and the Cali Cartels of the 80s from drug trafficking and they have cleaned up the country a lot since then to make it a great place to visit but I thought it was funny that we been here for less than 30 minutes and my man offers me a good time. He seemed disappointed that I just wanted to drink so he takes us to the condo and I pay our fare.

The condo is beautiful just like the pictures with an amazing ocean view, the tiresome traveling weekend is all but forgotten now that we are finally here. The first day was pretty uneventful once we got here, lots of sitting on the patio enjoying the view and later on we did head out to one of the restaurants on the strip from a nice dinner and sangria. We are finally in Colombia now it’s time to have some fun!!!

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