Oops, wrong spelling, guess you're not going anywhere ...

It's been a while since we've left the country, but we are back at it.  But we didn't get off to a good start.

Left Tuesday night from Portland to fly to Senegal West Africa, for a couple of weeks work for our Andando Foundation.  This is a non-profit focusing on development projects in remote villages, including wells and water efforts, market gardens, education programs, micro loans, feeding programs, building projects, and last but not least, health posts.

For this particular trip, we are accompanied by our friend and professional photographer Danae.  She has traveled a lot, but this is her first trip to Africa, and she is bringing along some rather sophisticated equipment that will run on batteries out in the boonies.

In fact, Danae was the lucky winner of the first travel mishap (if you want to call it that).  When we got to the airport to check in, we had a bunch of heavy bags and such, and she was first up to get her boarding pass.

Turns out her last name was spelled wrong on the reservation.  Hard to misspell "Jones" it would seem.
Anyway the guy at the counter was not terribly helpful, and said things like "you can't get on the plane" or "they will cancel your ticket and you will have to buy another one" and "guess you're gonna miss the flight".  A little too much drama ... can't you just fix it?

This went on for a while, longer than it should have really, and the ticket agent guy got on the phone forever with no luck.  Not exactly sure who he was calling, but they were not much help.

In the meantime, Fiona and I checked in with another agent and breezed right through.  I spoke to our agent about Danae's dilemma, and she said just go for it with the misspelled name, it's no big deal.  
I asked her to speak to her colleague who was holding things up and she did.  He relented to some extent, but by this time Danae was on the phone trying to sort things out on her end.  Eventually we all agreed she should just hang up and go for it, and she sailed right through security.  

It was all kind of a pain, but Danae kept her cool, and we are now boarding the flight.   All's well that ends well?  Only ... we are just beginning ...