The Adventure Begins!

Photos:
*The wedding party outside the Columbia River Temple
*With our friend Scott Pass, in the Seattle Airport while on our way to Peru

We finished at the MTC Thursday (8/20/2015) at noon and began the drive to the temple in Richland, WA where Natalie and Brad were married on Friday. Brad the Brave spent the ten-hour journey by car with his future in-laws and managed to reply calmly even to the 274th question about his upbringing from his future father-in-law. Natalie seemed relieved when we delivered him intact to his family awaiting him in Richland.

Natalie had a beautiful wedding followed by a reception the next evening at Grandma & Grandpa Merrill's home in East Wenatchee. One final day of church services at our home in East Wenatchee and then early Monday morning we were off to Peru, or that was the plan at least.

So we got up Monday morning at 3:00 am and Rob showered, shaved, got dressed, and checked the e-mail. The Alaska flight we were scheduled on was cancelled due to a mechanical problem in Seattle. The E-mail came in 15 minutes after we had gone to bed so we didn’t see it until this morning. Rob called church travel and they were able to reroute us, but unfortunately we would not be able to make our original connection which would get us to Lima that night. We were booked on a red-eye flight getting us into Lima on Tuesday morning at 5:00 am.

We checked in for our new flight (which had a few complications) and as we passed through screening, the water filter we were given in the MTC that was in Mary's carryon bag tested positive for chemicals consistent with explosives. Therefore, Mary got to enjoy a thorough TSA screening. She got the full pat-down and they disassembled and tested every item in her backpack and her carry-on suitcase. Both of which were completely packed with lots of stuff and could barely be closed. 

As soon as they finished testing an item they attempted to stuff it back into the backpack and suitcase. Even all the snack items that Tracie Manning had sent this morning with Dave had to be taken out, individually examined, and tested. By this time everybody had loaded onto the plane and they announce on the PA system that if passengers Merrill are in the terminal they are about to close the door for the flight. NOOOOOOO!!!!

I quickly went to the podium and explained the situation, pointing to security where Mary was attempting to stuff her things back into place. He scanned the passes and then we watched as she stuffed, and stuffed, and stuffed—and finally just grabbed things and carried on a big armful of items.

She got them repacked into the suitcase once we were settled in Seattle for a layover. (Long one in Seattle (5.5 hours) and short one (1.2 hours) in Dallas.) 

Well, as fate would have it, our arrival concourse in Dallas changed and we landed in a different concourse from our departure concourse for Lima. We were able to quickly make our way to our new concourse and boarded our Peru-bound flight without further incident.

We arrived in Peru about a half-hour early and since it was 5:00 in the morning, there was just our flight for immigration and customs which we sailed through in about 10-15 minutes (or less--we were kind of tired and not entirely sure of the time) and exited to meet and greet our hosts in Lima. However, nobody was there for us, we were early, so we waited and watched and after a while a man appeared with a board that had our name written on it so we knew we had been found!