I arrived in Toronto a few days before our flight to Buenos Aires, as I wanted to visit friends.  On the day of our midnight flight, Marieke and I met up with her friends for a drink.  As it was right after work for everyone else, soon there were eight of us from opposite ends of the country (Vancouver and Newfoundland) in downtown Toronto enjoying a couple of beers.  My original plan was to head back to my friends’ place to eat dinner, grab my stuff, head to the subway then the bus to the airport.  Suddenly, it was about 8:00pm and we still had to get back to my friends’ apartment and make it the airport. We grabbed an Uber to save some time, dashed up to the apartment, and ran to the closest entrance to the subway.  Of course, this entrance seemed to think that tokens dropped into the machine should jam, rather than let us through. We ran another block to the next entrance and got on the train.

Marieke’s friends

The optimistically named “rocket” bus to the airport supposedly comes every nine minutes. Twenty minutes of waiting, and we were not convinced, anxiously looking at our watches.  We finally arrived at the airport at 9:15pm, thirty minutes past our recommended check in time. Nevertheless, I checked in easily, although somewhat dismayed that my backpack weighed 19.5 kg, about 6.5 kg heavier than what I normally carry.  The camping gear had better get used!

One very heavy backpack

Not seeing Marieke anywhere after she went to grab her bag from stored luggage from her flight in earlier that morning, I proceeded to security and headed to the gate to finish a couple of work emails before signing off for good, or at least for December.  About two minutes before our flight left, I finally found Marieke, who had a harder time checking in.  Apparently there was an issue with her baggage tag, as she threw out the original one marked Toronto, a problem for some reason, even though she needed a new one for Buenos Aires.  It didn’t help that there was limited time left to check in, a fact the airline representative reinforced by counting down every minute with “you now have five minutes to check in”.  Finally, the issue was resolved by calling in help, right at the “you now have two minutes to check in” speech.  We were pretty happy to board the flight.

Unexpected stop in Chile

After a somewhat unexpected stop in Chile (there was no reference to this on our tickets), about 15 hours later we arrived in Buenos Aires.  We decided to save 200 pesos ($20 CAD blue dolar rate), by getting a shuttle bus to drop us a subway ride away from our hostel rather than getting a direct taxi.  Before our stop, we were told to get out and wait for a car because there was a problem with the terminal.  This was starting to feel like India, being herded from a nice bus to a squished car with two other passengers, for no apparent reason.  But Argentina is not India.  An hour later and a couple of stops later, we arrived right in front of our hostel, without being asked for a peso extra.  

Checked in within minutes to an empty dorm room, we knew this was going to be a far different trip than last year!  And getting on our next flight would be much less dramatic…