My son spent the weekend at home and woke up Monday to get on the phone and get the orchids inspected and sent up here to San Francisco.

Things didn’t go quite so easily though. Many of the numbers he had been given were disconnected. When he finally reached agriculture, the manager told him Thai Air needed to bring the orchids to them. Thai Air, however, said ag had to come to them. This went on all day with no progress.

On Tuesday, Thai Air agreed it was their job to take the orchids to ag. So ag gave him a 2 p.m. appointment. The end was in sight, or so we thought.

At 2:15 p.m. the USDA agent called and said a few documents were there as copies and they couldn’t inspect without the originals – the same originals the agent (who we are told really isn’t an agent, but just signed her name as one) at the airport returned and said they didn’t need.

So it was off to the post office to have the originals sent overnight to the USDA. They would be there by noon on Wednesday.

Wednesday afternoon the ag inspector called – they received the documents, the orchids passed inspection, but there was one problem. My son packed a new pair of shoes he’d just bought in Turkey and a pair of nearly new hiking boots in the bottom of the orchid box. The hiking boots had some dirt in the treds. He would have to confiscate them. Pfft. Had my son worn them in or packed them in his suitcase they would have been just fine.

So we really didn’t care about hiking boots at this point. What mattered was that the orchids had made it through the inspection. Now we just needed to get them to SFO. We asked United to send them as bonded baggage so they could clear customs in SFO, but no luck. We called everyone – customs, Thai Air, UPS – no luck. We tried customs brokers, but it was late in the afternoon and no one we tried was available.

By this time we were wondering about the orchids. We called friends in Hawaii who own an orchid farm and asked how much more time the orchids probably had left in the box. They told us they should be good for a week. It had been six days since my son boxed them up in Bangkok. It was now or never …

So I did the only logical thing …I bought a ticket to LAX for the next morning. They may have turned into expensive orchids, maybe even expensive dead orchids, but we had too much time invested to give up now.

Next: What do you mean the orchids are still being detained by agriculture?