Home Again, Home Again, Jiggety-Jig

Oy, what a day! I woke to sunny skies in Belize City this morning and the sound of hammering as the hotel began removing its plywood hurricane shields from the windows. As everyone has already heard, Felix ended up following a more westerly path across Nicaragua and Honduras. I have yet to hear word from our project site on the Bay Island of Roatan. I'm not looking forward to that report. Although the day looked calm and clear in Belize, on stepping outside and facing south the sky was looking bruised and menacing. While Belize was spared a beating, some serious rain was on the way. I headed back to my room to finish packing.

So after cheating disaster in Belize, I boarded my Continental flight on Tuesday morning for a non-stop trip to Houston. Except Gaia wasn't finished with her mischief. On initial decent to Houston, we found ourselves circling Houston for about 20 minutes since a thunderstorm cell had settled directly over the Bush International Airport. The captain announced that since we were low on fuel and Houston had closed runways on all arrivals and departures, we would have to land and refuel at the alternate airport in Lafayette. Now I still don't know (nor care) if it was Lafayette, Texas or Lafayette, Louisiana... but that's where we sat for an hour, unable to deplane as this was an international flight and the ambiguous Lafayette airport had no immigration facilities.

We finally made it to Houston and I sweated through a crazy immigration and customs clusterfuck with just a few minutes remaining before my San Francisco flight home. Ah, home. I've been logging a lot of miles lately and I can't recall the last weekend I didn't work. And there's still one major trip looming in a week to Bonaire, Netherlands Antilles, to work with the marine park there. But for right now, it's great to be home with Manuel, and my pillow, and able to cook for myself again and not rely on take-out or room service. Time to recharge the batteries.