Flight to Lima: Dealing with Disruption

Our trip to Lima began on Tuesday afternoon. We loaded our stuff into the station wagon and our wonderful friend/surrogate family member Travetta was kind enough to ride with us to the airport and then drive our car back to be safely stowed away in Knoxville while we are away. The trip was uneventful enough to begin with. We had an on time departure and arrival to Dallas, a comfortable layover that allowed us to sit down and eat a decent meal with plenty of time to board our late night flight to Lima. Except that flight didn't go exactly as planned.


First off, these long trips just keep changing. They change because the Little Lady changes, or at least that's most of it. This was certainly not happening the last time we went to Peru two years ago:

It is amazing how much more she can do for herself now. We still have the stroller along since it's easy to get tired taking long walks on the noisy streets of Lima. But the Little Lady can do so much on her own now. And can provide "feedback" (we'll call it) when things are not going how she wants them to be going. Fortunately, she is also pretty reasonable when it comes to dealing with disappointment and responding to reason in even pretty challenging circumstances.

She is a great traveler. She always has been and continues to be. For the first flight of about 2.5 hours, the grand total of entertainment she needed was one sticker book. One sticker book for 2.5 hours. This amazes me and makes me feel pretty fortunate.

So we got to DFW right on time and were ready for about a 3.5 hour layover. The one tricky issue was that the three of us were scattered all over the plane. When seats were assigned we were not put together. The LL was flying on an award ticket and Jana and I could not get seats together even months in advance. There are so many seats that have a fee attached to them now that no-fee seats go quickly. We were not afraid. This has happened before and it always works out. It's not like they are going to put a four year old by themselves 20 rows away from her parents. So that was the one goal we had for the layover. Get a gate agent to sort out the seats.

They were working on that when I noticed the sign for the flights departure time change from about 10:15 PM to 8:30 AM. That's a major disruption. What to do? I immediately got on the phone to see what hotels were available nearby. We have a credit card with a great perk. If a flight is disrupted for any reason that causes an overnight delay, the card will reimburse up to $300/night for lodging. I've used it before and was planning to use it again. It's one thing to be delayed overnight with a four year old, and by "one thing" I mean a really crappy thing. But it would be a whole other level of difficulty to also have to sleep in the airport. Not gonna do it. So hotel it was going to be. But then, shockingly, we learned the airline would take care of the hotel. It was a maintenance issue, so they had to pay. Not bad except that the hotel shuttle never came so we had to Uber it to the hotel and it took like an hour to get there given the time we spent waiting on the shuttle that never came.

I can assure you we slept better in the hotel than we would have on the overnight flight. But there was still a big issue. We brought enough entertainment for the LL to keep her occupied on the first short flight and for her brief anticipated awake time on the overnight flight. An 8:30 AM flight is 7 hours of waking time. That made us nervous, as did finding food for her for the flight since we never trust airplane food due to her nut allergy. Fortunately she slept for about 3 hours. And after she woke up she was engrossed in books, and drawing, and some puzzle games. Only at the very end did she start to get fussy, and even that was manageable.

Fortunately, the transfer from the airport to the apartment went as planned. The LL fell asleep on the 45 minute ride. We think the apartment is great, and we were able to get things more or less set up in the apartment even though we did not arrive until about 5 PM. I'll make more comparisons between the two apartments we've had in Lima at some later point. For now, we are happy to be here and happy that the LL was a travel trooper. We have several days of work conferencing coming up and then on to a more or less normal North American summer of writing and doing research-related work.