We're almost there....

Another update on our crazy life... we can't even go home for the holidays without an adventure (or rather, several!).

We awoke on Wednesday, December 20 at our normal hour of 6am as we still had to teach for the morning. I taught, and was supposed to have a prep period from 9 - 9:40am. The Spanish teacher had PROMISED to come, but I guess she was having too much fun with her friends to show up. No apologies, nada. Kris dropped a TV cart on his fingers and split them open, resulting in throbbing fingers and a nasty headache.

We also realized the night before that we also had no insurance for driving in the States. Luckily, Laurie called out of the blue, and I asked her, and it turned out her NEIGHBOUR could get us insurance. So right after work, we had to go get insurance.

While we were there, we get a phone call asking us if we were coming to the work Christmas party (the POSADA). We said yes, and the lady proceeded to tell us that we needed to go ALL THE WAY HOME first to get our passports because they wouldn't release my FM-3 (work permit) until they saw my passport again!

So at the posada, Kris gets his FM-3, while I have to still wait. We also asked for a letter from the superintendent agreeing to pay for any expenses in case we don't get the permits. Guess who left the letter (which was supposedly written and signed on Monday) at the school?? And guess who predicted that this would happen? So I pull out a version I typed up and get her to sign :).

As we are leaving the party (and having won NO prizes in the RIFA (raffle), we have lost Yvon, who was coming with us to San Antonio. We call, and he has taken a cab somewhere. So we grab his bags, and wait till he returns. Then, we decide to go to Imigracion to see if we can speed up the FM-3 wait. We get there only to find out that the guy who was getting it for me had JUST left!!!! Ai-ya!

Luckily, someone had his number and he came right back. So, FM-3s in hand, we head back to our apartment to get our bags. As we get to our house, Yvon gets a call from Jamilla. He had left his laptop at the posada and she had it. So now, Kris and Yvon have to go to another friend's house to pick it up!

The fun doesn't stop there. We finally get on the road at 7pm - rush hour in Monterrey. We go about 7km in 40 minutes. When we finally get near the US border, we are stopped at some checkpoint, and pulled over because the guy wanted a thorough look at our work permits. LUCKILY we got them - we may not have gotten out of Mexico otherwise cause we got this stickler checker!

We reach the border, and finally leave Mexico. We get all the way to San Antonio at about 1:30am, and I had printed the wrong directions... so we had to stop several times to get directions. When we learned where we had to go, the one exit we needed was blocked off!

Then we spent all day today (Thursday) hanging out, get to the airport, and find out our flight to Minneapolis has been delayed by an hour and that meant we would miss the flight from Minneapolis to Saskatoon. Compensation for this? We each got a $10 voucher for food at PARTICIPATING airport vendors. And there was no internet at the airport. We managed to steal some signal from the business center, and book a hotel in Minneapolis (where I am now writing this).

We get here, and it turns out our hotel isn't on the list of the free hotel shuttle phones! YAY! And then, we can't get our bags, so we have no clothes. DOUBLE YAY!! And then, we ask for an overnight kit, which we were promised by Northwest Airlines, only to find out they ran out of them yesterday.

So, we have now been pretty much without sleep for almost 48 hours. Hopefully we'll get to Saskatoon tomorrow.

GOOD NIGHT!