Traveling to Nicaragua

My time in Nicaragua has come and gone and it was a wonderful experience.  Lots of amazing things happened during that time.  I hope to capture those times in the next few blog posts.  The rest of this post will be dedicated to traveling to Nicaragua.
The project trip is a special time because there has never been a time where all of the team members have been in once place at one time.  In fact, rarely has the project leader ever met all of the team members before seeing everyone at an airport on our way to the project site.  This trip was no different.  I started off in Colorado Springs which would then take me to Houston where I would meet up with the rest of the team.  There were five of us there at the airport Thursday morning.  We made our way through security and all the other requirements for airports and then on to the plane.  During this time, some entertaining things were happening.  I could sense that a few of the people with me were getting rather tense through this situation of coordinating 15 people flying from all over the States to get to one spot.  I took it upon myself to "lighten" the situation with a little bit of humor.  I don't remember exactly what I would say but it was starting to work.  
We made it safely to Houston where we eventually met up with the rest of our team members.  From there we flew down to Managua Nicaragua and stayed the night in a local hotel that was just across the street from the airport.  The next day we would fly across the country to the Caribbean side and land in Bluefields.  The next day we woke up and went to the airport to get our tickets and wait for our plane.  This was going to be an exciting trip because of the smallness of the vehicles.  I should have known that we were in for an adventure when I got my ticket.

Yes, this is a laminated piece of cardstock with a permanent marker "4" on it.  We would turn the ticket back in before boarding the plane.  Speaking of plane, it held 14 people (including pilot and copilot).  Here's what the plane looked like from the outside.

It was nice and cozy on the inside.  Here's a picture from the front row looking back.

But don't worry, we were looking out for the pilot and copilot as well.  If we saw any flashing red lights or anything else that looked alarming, we could tell them because we weren't that far away.

Being a former airplane engineer, I was excited about being so close to the pilots and seeing most other part of the plane.  Let's just say that not everyone else on board shared my enthusiasm.  That was about all the excitement in traveling for now until we went to our project site.  I'll wait to talk about that in the next post.