It seems like a year in the works we’ve been planning for this cruise and it’s finally here! This is a bucket list for both Kathy and I and a trip to my 7th and final continent of the world, Antarctica!
We’ll spend almost a month end to end with 3 days touring Santiago, Chile, then 22 days on the Holland America Oosterdam cruise ship including 4 days in Antarctica.
We’ll be going down the western coast of South America thru the Chilean fjords and the mountains of Patagonia with the last port in Chile being Ushuaia which they say is the furthest inhabited city in the world.
We’ll then cross the Drake Passage which are the roughest seas in the world to reach Antarctica. We’ll then cruise along the coast of Antarctica for 4 days and then cross over the Drake Passage again to get to the eastern side of South America visiting the Falkland Islands and then working up the coast of Argentina and Uruguay ending in Buenos Aries.
But we don’t stop there! We’ll then fly to Iguazu Falls and spend 3 days there seeing the falls from the Brazil, Argentina and Paraguay side all of which are supposed to be spectacular. They say it may even be grander than Niagara Falls!
We then fly back to Buenos Aires the morning of Sat Feb 4th and take an overnight flight back to Charlotte arriving on Sun Feb 5th.
So that’s our itinerary! Now let me tell you about day 1. It started off really rocky! Within 5 mins of leaving my house I get a flat tire! Ugh… But thank God for AAA!! They came in literally 5 mins and put my spare on and I was on my way.
We had decided to fly thru Dallas rather than Miami to get to Santiago since they had more standby seats. The flight from Charlotte to Dallas was smooth with no problem. We actually had a 4 hour layover so we used it to watch the Chiefs beat the Raiders at Buffalo Wild Wings in the airport.
We kept checking the flight and it kept saying there were two seats open in first class and we were 1st and 2nd on the priority list so we thought we had them for sure. But when we were finally ready to board there was only 1 seat in first and one seat in Premium Economy. OK, I know what a great person Kathy is but she is so amazing that she let me take the first class seat!! And the flight is 9 hours and 15 mins long! Am I a lucky dude to have her in my life or what? I’m not worthy!!
The flight was smooth and we arrived with all our luggage in tact and we grabbed a taxi and got to our hotel ready to explore for the day! Today’s high is going be 87!! It’s definitely summer here! Tomorrow I’ll fill you in on day 1 in Santiago. Luckily we’re only two hours ahead of East Coast time so not too bad on the jet lag!
The Wandering Italian 