Houston we have a problem

After a week in Mexico, it was time to pack it up and head home. We arrived at the airport 2 hours before our flight to find an already long line at Continental. We found out that their computers were down and they had to hand write the boarding passes. So that meant we did not get our boarding passes for our connecting flight in Houston.

We ended up leaving the airport a half hour late. We were hoping to "make it up in the air" (why can't they always just fly faster?), and ended up only being 15 minutes late to Houston. The flight attendants reassured us that there would be plenty of assistance in Houston to help us all get our boarding passes so we wouldn't miss our connecting flights.

When you fly international, you have to go through Customs at your point of entry into the US. You then have to get your checked bags from the baggage carousel, recheck it and go through security.

Customs had a long line, but went pretty fast. No problems. We got our checked bag and then headed towards security. We got into line, got up to the guy and he told us we couldn't go through since we had a hand written baggage tag (due to the mishaps in Zihua). We then got in a huge, slow moving line for Continental so we could get our bag retagged and get our boarding pass. It was now 20 minutes before our flight was supposed to leave. It was chaos, there were many people in the same boat as us and many people that had already missed their flight. Ryan finally got a Continental employee's attention, pretty much by yelling at her, and I ran and got our boarding passes from a kiosk and she took our bag and said she would get it tagged. Yeah, we had a lot of confidence that bag would make it onto our plane that was leaving in 10 minutes!

We ran up the stairs and found out we had to take a train to our terminal. We then sprinted to our gate to see the plane still there (and they had changed the departure time to 10 minutes later). We boarded the plane and sat down. And waited. There were several people they will still waiting for. Ryan was pretty sure that they would leave as soon as there weren't any more empty seats.

We finally were airborne. It was after 7pm now so we were pretty hungry. Lucky for us, I had a surplus bag of Cheetos in the backpack. Yum yum. We landed in Indy to yucky, cold, rainy weather. We headed to baggage claim with dim hopes of seeing our bag. And wouldn't you know it, as soon as the bags started coming down the chute, Ryan got paged to Continental's desk. Yep, our bag was still in Houston.

The Continental lady in Indy was super nice and said our bag would be delivered to our house the next afternoon. And it was. And everything was still in the bag.

They use stair cars in Zihua!

The boys had a great time at Memaw and Pawpaw's house. Thanks again to everyone at the "compound" for taking care of them while we were gone!

It's been a little tough getting back into the routine this week. Hopefully next week goes better!