Back and forth
The morning of the day we left, January 5th, happened to unleash a blizzard on Toronto, our first layover destination. By the time we got there, our connecting flight was delayed several hours. We finally boarded our plane to Santiago and strapped in for a quick 12-hour, 7000 mile jaunt. We flew over the Florida Keys, Cuba, Peru, a whole lot of water, and touched down in Santiago on the afternoon of the 6th. We had missed our connecting flight by an hour and ended up haplessly wandering the airport for the rest of the afternoon. When it became clear that we were not getting anywhere that day, we decided to stay in Santiago until our rescheduled flight, two days later. Unfortunately, there did not seem to be any signs pointing us to baggage claim. We ended up dashing through the airport ‘Duty Free’ mall six times. Finally, we were pointed down a stairway that said something along the lines of “entrar prohibido” and we were set free. We soon found our bike boxes in a lonely corner of baggage claim. After a brief conversation with the abandoned luggage supervisor man, we learned we would have to take our bikes with us. After seeing Audrey’s puppy dog eyes, he paused, said, “uno momento” and called his friend Martín. Soon, I was blindly rolling our bike boxes through the airport on a cart while Audrey led the way, trying to remember the convoluted directions to Martín’s office. We passed through several more “entrar prohibido” doors, an expansive elevator, and a long winding hallway reminiscent of Severance. We left our bikes with a friendly woman, possibly Martín, and began our public transit journey into the city.
We spent the next couple days lounging in the city, sleeping in until 12:30 and staying up until early in the morning. We ate the most delicious seafood, walked through the park near our Airbnb, and watched Madagascar. On Thursday we went back to the airport, found our bikes, rolled them back through the circuitous hallway and into the bag drop area which was packed with people. I blindly drove the cart through a sea of line-bound travelers in search of the oversized baggage drop. After about 20 minutes and four times back and forth through the crowd, we found a very helpful woman who let us skip the line. Upon checking in our bikes again, we were forced to pay a $220 oversized fee, despite originally checking them all the way through.
A few hours later, we descended into Bariloche, beholding a magnificent view of a perfectly conical volcano and an endless jagged series of peaks that reached to the horizon.
We assembled our bikes by the waiting airport taxis and rode into town, where we were met by a host of food trucks and live music on the lake shore. We made it!
