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Friday, December 15, 2000

Only a few hours now before we leave. Since we have to get up at about 2 am to get to the airport on time, I decided to wake up earlier than usual today. So, I got up around 7 AM. This, I figured, would help me get to sleep early this evening. Otherwise, my normal cycle is to read until 1 or 2 am. As you can see below, where I'm trying to eat breakfast, it hasn't quite worked out the way I had hoped.

Thanks in particular to Richard for his advice about going to Customs here and registering anything that I'm taking with me that has a serial number. That will save time later and will prevent questions about what I brought with me and what I bought on the trip.

The customs office here can best be described as being in the "low rent district" near the airport. Not that it's a bad location -- it's right behind the police station. In fact, if I were to crank open a window of the airplane while we taxi on the tarmac, I could probably spit in the Customs Office window. The people there were nothing but helpful, however. Then even gave me a pamphlet entitled, "Know Before You Go", which should tell me what to expect on this first-ever trip outside of the country. [Well, we don't count Canada as outside of the country, we consider them to be just those strange relatives we hardly ever visit.]

We leave here on American Airlines flight 616A from San Francisco, and switch to some flight in Dallas, then another in San Juan, Puerto Rico. Then we arrive at St. Kitts at 11:01 PM local time (one hour later than EST, 4 hours later than PST). Assuming we don't show up in the news, and assuming we find a way to get on the Internet, our next report should be from St. Kitts.

I'm going back to sleep now.

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