Almost 80 Days (part two)
Well, he made it.
Eli 22.8 called from Oxford, and he sounded as relieved as I've ever heard him coming back from a trip. Not from the trip itself, which was great, but the traveling home part. I got some more details.
Sunday: in Mongu, the hotel has no electricity when he arrives. In itself, this is not surprisingly, because off-loading happens all the time, and the power comes back on a few hours later. In this case, though, it didn't come back on until 5 a.m., and he was leaving in two hours. One night of burning hot sleep (no fans).
Monday: I was wrong about the overturned vehicle being a truck. It was a bus, and it overturned while swerving to avoid an elephant in the road. The eight hour bus trip to Lusaka took fourteen hours. He arrives at the hotel. No power. The power never comes back on. Two nights of burning hot sleep.
Tuesday: He goes to a movie in the morning (power is back on), and then heads for the airport, where he's told he's flying stand-by from Nairobi to Paris. He talked to every person in the Kenya Airways office, and finally they called Nairobi and put everyone on speaker. The issue gets discussed for over an hour, at which point an office employee prints out a boarding pass and hands it to him.
Wednesday: He needs to take a train from Paris to Lille (something about getting to the Chunnel), and it's announced that the train will be two hours late, which means he'll miss the train to London entirely. Fifteen minutes later, a train pulls up and they suddenly announce it's leaving. He literally jumps on board as the train is leaving and the door are closing.
Eli's never bothered by anything that happens while he's traveling--always even-keeled, never really annoyed. When I was in Mexico with C, I called to tell him of our multiple disasters and he said, "Dad, congratulations. You're really traveling now!" with his customary good cheer.
Everyone, though, has an exception.
He did say everything except the return trip was fantastic, and sounded very happy that he went.
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