Struggle to Escape, part one.

Insanity.

Totally bonkers and nutty and filled with stress.

That’s what’s it’s like to try and fly on Lloyd Aereo Boliviano.

First one can­cel­la­tion, then the sec­ond. I went to the air­port and they gave me a voucher for a hotel. The Red Roof Inn at MIA was per­fectly pleas­ant. I walked next door and paid way too much for decent food at Bennigan’s. I enjoyed walk­ing in the evening of Miami, though, after the chills of Missouri. So, okay, good hotel expe­ri­ence for a free night.

I was told that the next day we’d have a flight. Right, what­ever. I went with it, though. I sched­uled it with the con­tact in Miami, the kind fam­ily that let me stay at their house when the flights were can­celled, to store my lug­gage (8 pieces, not count­ing the cat) in their pickup through­out the day. That way I wouldn’t have to deal with that mon­strousity of a headache while nego­ti­at­ing to make sure I had a flight. Plan fell through. Without delv­ing into details, I soon found myself with all 8 pieces of lug­gage and a cat in the air­port com­pletely on my own. Oh, but was this fun!

I camped out with all of the lug­gage right in front of the LAB tick­et­ing counter. It was 2:00pm. The counter would open at 7:00pm. At about 3:30pm I real­ized that I had to get to the bank in order to pull out the cash for my lug­gage and any emer­gen­cies over­seas between Miami and Cochabamba, Bolivia. and yet? Luggage. I had all of the trunks and duf­fel bags stacked onto two air­port lug­gage carts, with Captain Pausert’s Prison perched atop one of them. Keep in mind that my pre­vi­ous air­port expe­ri­ence involved my passport/wallet/ID/cash/everything stolen while I was car­ry­ing it. I was not about to leave my lug­gage. I did part from it to run the 60 feet to an air­port direc­tory map in order to deter­mine where the bank was.

The LAB counter, where I was camped, was in Concourse E Level 2. The Bank of America was in Concourse A Level 4. Maybe B. I think A. Whatever — it was far.

I pushed one cart ahead of me and pulled the other behind. They were dis­as­trous to steer — I’d aim them in the nec­es­sary direc­tion and then move for­ward about six feet. Then I’d pause, re-align, and push. Repeat. Repeat through ele­va­tors. Repeat through count­less long hall­ways. Repeat up and down inclines. Repeat repeat repeat. I made it to the Bank of America and back to the LAB counter with my lug­gage carts only unstack­ing them­selves mess­ily once, and I burned about 9,000,000 calo­ries. It took almost an hour and a half.

Skip ahead through the hours. I’m tired and pissy and I want to be in Bolivia. The LAB fel­low comes out and starts arrang­ing the line-organizing-poles. I was smi­ley and mak­ing chitchat. All was well. They started speak­ing very, very fast Spanish to let every­one know what the deal was. I essen­tially monop­o­lized the Guy In Charge because he was will­ing to speak English. They had a list of names of the peo­ple that were going to be able to fly out that night. I was #2.

This was a Very Good Thing.

Except, of course, I would be fly­ing on a dif­fer­ent air­line and thus only be able to take one piece of lug­gage. LAB would fly all of my other 8 lug­gage pieces via cargo the next week. Problem: when lug­gage flies cargo, the cargo goes through the very intense ver­sion of cus­toms. Fortunes are swiftly charged. I’d pay more in cus­toms than I’d paid to pur­chase the sup­plies and fly them via pas­sen­ger plane! Unacceptable, and the LAB guy was openly lying about the cus­toms issue and mock­ing my refusal. The alter­na­tive was that I accept the flight on AeroSur and put my lug­gage on standby. I knew, though, that once I signed and accepted the AeroSur ticket that LAB would no longer accept me as their respon­si­bil­ity. The guy even said so, at one point! So, hypo­thet­i­cally, I could end up stuck in Miami with all of my things, hav­ing been aban­doned by the con­tact who’d promised my father he’d man­age the air­port headaches, and be with­out a ticket to Bolivia and with­out a voucher for hotels.

That would be a Very Bad Thing.

I spent the next hour + some argu­ing and fight­ing for a com­mit­ment that my lug­gage would be accepted and LAB would Make Everything Work. I recorded it all, and one of these days I’ll upload it for amuse­ment and pos­ter­ity. The process was mad­den­ing — I’d nego­ti­ate with LAB Jerkface who claimed he was the Highest LAB Official on the Eastern U.S. Coast that night, my father would call me for an update, he’d call the travel agent and find out that what LAB Jerkface was say­ing was non­sense, and then I’d nego­ti­ate again. Eventually every­thing was at a stand­still. I agreed to let LAB store my lug­gage in their office while I grabbed a sand­wich and went to the bath­room. One sand­wich pur­chased and stored in my TimBuk2 and a HUGE espresso swiftly guz­zled at Starbucks, and I was set. I camped out back at the LAB counter and pho­tographed the LAB Jerkface for records-purposes.

I reini­ti­ated chats with my fel­low stranded pas­sen­gers. A bond had quickly grown between us through­out the day. Most of them barely spoke English, and I’d not prac­ticed Spanish since the col­lege courses… it was lim­ited. One lady, how­ever, informed me that AeroSur was allow­ing extra lug­gage after all. A bit of ques­tion­ing later, and I decided to go to AeroSur myself to find out what was up.

In the mean­time, my father had called the boss of the fel­low who’d aban­doned me at MIA. The boss sent the guy back out. By that time, of course, I’d got­ten past the worst of the expe­ri­ences and really wasn’t excited about deal­ing with an addi­tional vari­able, no mat­ter how good the fellow’s inten­tions were. Regardless, he reap­peared and helped me cart my things through the lines at AeroSur, which I did greatly appreciate.

For the first time in hours, I had hopes of mak­ing it out of the coun­try intact.