Allison and I had a great time visiting friends and family in the States over Christmas.  Since my family lives in Nashville and Allison’s in Alabama we split time between the two states.  I actually flew back a week earlier than Allison to replace the main drain line on our house in Nashville.  My first day back it snowed.  It was quite a contrast to the heat of Haiti and Living on a boat.  I sat outside in the snow in some gym shorts and a t-shirt for about 30 minutes.  It literally felt like the heat was steaming off my body.  I like to imagine that I looked something like Hans Solo being brought out of his frozen carbonite chamber.

After a few weeks of catching up with friends and family it was time to pack up and head back to Haiti.  We were in South Alabama flying out of Talahassee Florida.  Our flight was supposed to leave at 7:00am which meant leaving Alabama by 3:00am.

We started packing our bags about 8:30pm.  Around 9:00pm Allison’s Dad says “Don’t forget your passports”.  We looked everywhere.At 9:08 we call my parents in Nashville and asked him to check in the suitcase that we left stored in their garage.  At 9:10 my dad calls back and informs us that he has found our passports 400 miles away in Nashville.  Thankfully my sister and brother were at my parents house and offered to meet us halfway.  We arrived in Birmingham at midnight and booked it back to Allison’s parents house to arrive at 2:58am.  Since we were planning on leaving her parents house at 3:00am there was just enough time to take a pee break and load the car with our stuff.  We arrived at the Talahassee  airport just in time for our flight to be delayed 4 hours.

It still isn’t quite agreed upon who was responsible for the lost passports.  I think that it was more of a joint effort and Allison blames it completely on me.  We had two suitcases while we were in the states.  One had our winter clothes in it, and the other had Christmas presents and other random things. When we were in Tennessee someone set our passports on the nightstand. I had a horrible vision of us driving to Alabama and leaving them there.  So I thought “I’ll set them in the suitcase, that way we know for absolute certain that they will get to Alabama.” Before leaving we decided that we didn’t really need to bring a whole suitcase of winter clothes.  Allison went through the suitcase and got everything we needed to take to Alabama out of the suitcase and packed it in the one we were taking with us.  I knew there was something important in the suitcase, but I couldn’t quite remember what it was.  I probably asked Allison three or four times “You went through the suitcase and got everything we need??”  After a few times she got annoyed that I was asking the same question repeatedly and I shut up and forgot about it.  I guess you can take that information and place blame where you feel most appropriate.  Feel free to leave a comment letting us know what you think.  I’m sure Allison will have some interesting words that she will be writing in the comments as well.