Bolivia & Peru

Feb. 19, 2006-Getting to Miami, Florida

I hope to be able to send you these emails as we travel, but if it’s too difficult to find Internet sites where I can send I may wait until we get back to Akron and send your installments then. AOL limits the number of emails I can send at one time to 50 before they close our account for sending spam. If there is someone you’d like to forward these to please do so.

The fun began before we even got to Bolivia. We drove to Miami, our point of departure for S. America. We wanted to see my cousins Evelyn and David in Boynton Beach and visit my parents’ graves in Orlando and David’s parents’ in Miami. The first event was while we were still in Akron. David’s VISA card broke in half. Fortunately we were able to call VISA and have them overnight a new card to my cousins’.

The next “event” was on the highway between Charlotte, N. Carolina and Columbia, S. Carolina. There was what turned out to be a one-hour traffic jam. David was trying to change lanes when a semi stopped to let him merge. As we were halfway into the lane the truck began to move forward. I urged David to hurry into the lane since the truck kept on rolling. We had just gotten settled in our new slot when we felt a bump from behind. The truck had rear-ended us. As David flew out of our car to call the driver a few choice names, we got bumped again. I was afraid that David would get into a fight since he was the one overcome with road rage. The trucker got out of the cab holding his cell phone. He was very apologetic and said he’d been talking to his dispatcher and hadn’t seen us at all. He was extremely nice considering what David had called his mother and what David said he could do with the phone. We pulled our car up and there was no damage. We must have still been rolling when he tapped us.

Then not to lack for things to write you, David realized at 4AM in Orlando that he’d forgotten half of one of the meds he takes. When he was counting pills he failed to account for the fact that he takes them twice a day. Through that experience we learned that our insurance company pharmacy is open 24-hours a day. They were very helpful and since David had a refill on the script they authorized our CVS Pharmacy in Akron to send the script to an Orlando pharmacy. The next morning we had the pills.

I don’t want to come off as being perfect so I’ll confess that when we left the motel in Orlando to go to the pharmacy and the cemetery I forgot our laundry bag in our room. After a quick call we turned around and they had the laundry waiting at the front desk.

The rest of our journey has been uneventful. We are now waiting with our traveling companion & long time friend from Washington, DC, Judi Cope, at the Miami airport. We’re catching up on gossip and waiting to go to La Paz.

Toby