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Day 31 2/14/99 Starting Our Journey

Rondo: "Wait a minute? Where is my luggage? I'm sure that I can climb Kili without problems!"

Rondo: "Mom, are you sure that you want to leave me home alone? I'm sure I can keep quiet on the plane--okay, may be I'll just bark a few times."

2:15pm After a taxi ride, we were waiting for our plane at San Francisco International Airport. We have now passed the point of no return. Everything seems to have gone smoothly. (Okay, we did forget to bring addresses for writing postcards.) Theresa woke up early and took Rondo for a 4-mile walk. We are happy that Alex, our neighbor's son, will be staying with Rondo to take care of him. We went to mass at Mission San Jose and prayed for a happy, safe, and healthy journey. Instead of breakfast we decided to have a turkey+cranberry and also a vegetarian sandwich at Java City in Fremont. We got home by 12 noon and had just enough time to zip up all four of our duffel bags and got picked up by the taxi. With my detailed pre-trip planning and preparation, I thought I have gotten everything. Nope. We had to buy two bottles of water at the airport in order to make sure that we drink enough on the plane.

So far on our journey the most hilarious moment--Theresa had a good laugh anyway--was that I have to go through the metal detector 3 times before the airport security reluctantly let me pass. Afterwards I realize that it was probably all the metal on my hiking boots!

We were very impressed by KLM. The service was excellent. This was a MD11 plane named Florence Nightingale, which was also the same plane that we took a month later on the way back. You just have to wait until the end of the story to find out why the first landing at SFO was aborted!

This was not the most romantic way to celebrate Valentine's Day, but we managed! At least it was a good way to avoid the crowd at a restaurant.

KLM's plane had this great tracking system that shows us where we are. We were just a few minutes away from Amsterdam!