The Simplest of Tasks
The cruise has been interesting and worthy of more blog entries than I have given it but in this entry I'm going to focus on what happened just before we boarded the ship. Who would have thought adventures were to be had in mailing postcards?
As the science party was waiting to catch a launch out to the R/V Thompson, I was busy trying to find a mailbox. According to my guidebook of Ecuador and the Galapagos Islands the post office was about 75 meters from the marina. I found the post office with ease but because it was Sunday it was closed. No problem, I thought ahead and had already purchased my postage. All I needed was a drop box. In front of the closed post office was a blue rounded-top container that looked just like a US postal drop box. It even had two slots for dropping letters. Hey, it looked like a drop box so that's where I inserted my postcards.
About twenty minutes later everyone was still waiting for the launch to take them out to the R/V Thompson. Kelley and I were talking about the office and about how this wonderful woman Ivett works so hard to ensure that all of us NOAA OE employees get to where we are going. (among the many other things she does) It was then that Kelley and I decreed that Ivett deserves to at least get a post card for all of her hard work. I still had one stamp left over, so Kelley ran out, got a postcard and we both wrote a little note to Ivett. Now all we needed to do was mail it.
Kelley and I walked over to the mailbox and just after she had inserted the postcard, a woman came out of a nearby shop saying "NO, NO!!!" Apparently the drop box in front of the post office is not the real drop box. The real drop box is across the plaza from the post office, go figure?? So now, what to do about the postcards?
Well first Kelley and I tried flipping the faux drop box over but this didn't help much since the slots were too small to grab at anything. The kind woman that had promptly informed us of our mistake went back into her store and emerge with a piece of wire. At first we tried using the wire to fish for the postcards through the slot but after this didn't work the woman used the wire to pick the lock on the side door. To my surprise, this only took her about 15 seconds.
With the door open I proceeded to dive face-first into the smelly container and spent the next five minutes digging through a pile of trash but ultimately retrieved all three postcards. The woman, in her final act of kindness, pointed us across the plaza to the real drop box where we successfully inserted three, slightly battered postcards.
: