Nat Geo Screws Up. Again.

While Lindblad has been great, since their job was the handle the Galapagos cruise portion of the trip, National Geographic has not covered itself in glory on this trip.  I think they are too thinly staffed, and with COVID subsiding, stretched way too thin.

We get to the airport to fly out of the Galapagos, and the naturalists (not their fault) hand out the boarding passes.  I take mine and immediately stuff it into my wallet.  Carol takes hers, and does that weird thing where she actually looks at it.

Her diligence pays off, because our ticket says we are only going to Guayaquil, instead of staying on the plane and flying to Quito as planned for our trip extension.  Turns out Bruce and Nancy’s tickets were right, but Neil and Mary’s were also wrong.

Carol immediately shifts into that extra gear she has, the New Yorker gear, even though she has not lived in the state full-time since most of 1981.  Paulo (Paul) takes us under his wing, leads us to the airline counter, where the airline workers are confused for the better part of an hour.

Eventually they straighten that out, even though they tested our patience by asking multiple times, “Are you sure you are going on to Quito.”  Yes, we were quite sure, and we even indicated it on the forms we filled out, which collected but not looked at.  The first hint should have been the afternoon before when they tried to give Carol and Mary the luggage tags that said “Guayaquil” instead Quito.  

(Editor’s Note: Where were you and Neil?  Blogger: Are you kidding me?  Carol and Mary didn’t want us anywhere near the luggage tag distribution, as we would have lost the tags faster than Usain Bolt used to run the 100 meters.)

Carol was insistent that the airline workers pull the bags and make sure they are properly labeled.  Given that such a move involved work, the workers tried to avoid doing it, but they didn’t realize right away who they were dealing with.  

Eventually everything got sorted out, despite Nat Geo and Avianca’s best efforts.  We went through security, got empanadas for lunch, wolfed them down, and boarded the flight.  There went my plans of blogging for an hour before the flight.  But at least we got where we were going.