Sunrise

We were supposed to arrive at sunRISE, not after sunSET. But, you know what they say about plans. Instead, we all boarded the plane at 11 PM last night. After 2 hours of sitting on the plane and taxi-ing around, the pilot came on and said "Well folks, it looks like this plane isn't going South tonight." Weird sentence, right? What, could the plan go North? After we deplaned, I spoke with the pilot. Actually, yes, the plane COULD go North, but not South. There was some random valve problem, which rendered travel to South America a violation of FAA rules, as the altitude there is so different. I'll recap quickly. We needed vouchers, five in all. 1 for the hotel (some random casino that was 25 minutes away...) 2 for dinner/ breakfast, and 2 for the "SuperShuttle" to transport us there and back. After some serious finagling, including, of course, identifying the bottle neck -- Professor Rao would be proud!-- our group of 10 MBA students and 1 MBA professor managed to convince the attendants to hand over bulk vouchers for our group. When we left the terminal, the voucher queue was still bout 200 people long. So, the SuperShuttle was SuperBAD. It didn't show up until something like 5 AM, by which time my group had all jumped in cabs (60 bucks each way to get to the darn hotel), checked in and gone to bed. Notice I said BED not SLEEP. The other travelers continued to arrive until about 6 AM, 3 hours after we got to our rooms, which meant the noise level in the hall never really dipped below yelling. But, you know, it could have been worse. We could have been one of those 6AM people. I'm tired today, but not as tired as I'm sure my fellow travelers are. Our flight today didn't leave until 2:15 (a delay compared to its original 2 PM departure time, but not too bad) which is why we have such a view of the sunset.