Safe and Sound in Lima

     One of my less-than-brilliant ideas was pulling an all-nighter the night before I left for Lima.  I had to get up at about 3:45am anyway, so I figured there was no point in going to sleep.  Plus, I was so excited and nervous and anxious and ___________ (insert any emotion you can think of here) that I couldn't sleep anyway.  So by the time that I arrived in Lima, got to my apartment and fell into bed, I had been awake for 44 consecutive hours.  Not smart.
      I arrived at the Pellston airport at 5am on Wednesday morning for a 6:15 flight and at 8:00, I was still there.  My flight from Pellston was cancelled because of a mechanical problem on the plane (leave it to Pellston to only have one plane) and after some frustration, a few minutes on the phone with Delta, and a some fatigue-induced tears, my mom and my grandpa were in the car racing down to Traverse City to catch the next flight to Detroit.  On the way down, I don't know why, but I felt like I should double-check my itinerary, so I pulled out my iPod, opened up my email, and promptly shouted, "WHAT?!"  At the top of the itinerary were the words "Thursday, May 19".  So there I was rushing to Traverse City for a flight that didn't leave for 25 hours.  After a frantic 15 minutes on the phone with Delta (which is, by the way, the nicest and most helpful airline I've ever used) while my mom kept saying, "Should I stop or keep going?", I had a seat on a flight for Wednesday, May 18.  The trickiest part happened when I got to Detroit and had only 39 minutes to make it to my next gate.  Booking it through the airport, I arrived at the gate just in time to walk straight into the boarding line and onto the plane.  After a 7 hour flight, I stepped off the plane and breathed in the smell I'd been waiting to smell for months.  If you've been to Lima, you  know that that smell is a combination of fish and smog...not the most aesthetically pleasing combination, but to me it smelled like home.  A really long line at customs and a lost-luggage scare later, I finally walked out of security to see my friend Katy and Kari and Natalie (2 of my roommates) holding a "Welcome to Peru" sign, yelling my name and jumping up and down.  By that point the excitement had kicked in and I had forgotten that I hadn't slept in 40-some hours, but by the time we got back to the apartment, I remembered and was asleep about 1.2 seconds after my head hit the pillow.  It is now Friday and I much more news but it will have to wait until tomorrow.  Hasta entonces...