Our time in Columbia ended up totaling 10 hours. Since it's always best to try to make the best of every situation, we ended up purchasing a bottle of Crown Royal from the Duty Free shop (the only place besides the banos that we had access to in the tiny airport). Then, we made friends. One young couple from England were traveling "stand by" and were out of money, another guy was in Bolivia checking on his quinoa (keen-wa) business, while another was down there visiting relatives and heading back home to Miami. One lady pretended to be interested in us because she wanted a pour from our bottle.
Finally landing in Miami at 3 a.m. ET Friday morning we learned that we had a 7:30 a.m. flight to Chicago. An American rep gave us a voucher for a local hotel and told us that we could catch a bus "out front" to get there. Okay, let's think about this ... By now it's 3:15 a.m., we still have to go through customs, claim our luggage, catch a bus, check in, sleep???, wake up at 5 a.m., catch a bus back to the airport ........
You get the point. So we decided to find a bench and crash for a little bit. It just seemed a whole lot easier. To back up just a second, when we were at baggage claim, we saw the couple from England. Since they were flying stand by, they didn't qualify for a hotel voucher. So, we gave them ours along with our $12 dinner vouchers (again, what was American thinking? Dinner? At 6 a.m.?) We did keep our $7 breakfast vouchers and enjoyed a Startbucks Chia Tea Latte upon our 9:30 a.m. arrival to O'Hare.
We were elated when Anthony and Tucker came to pick us up. Not only was I excited to see them, but more importantly at that particular moment, I could already feel my pillow beneath my head. No more sore neck from foreign pillows. Yeah! Real sleep. Double Yeah!!
Bottom line ... we have no regrets on what we did or didn't do and see, nor did we feel our time there was too short or too long. Great places, great people, great adventure!
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