Saturday Feb 4 to Sunday Feb 5, 2023
Hi Gang! Today’s word once again was WATER! But luckily only directly from the Falls! It didn’t rain and we actually got sun and blue skies. We didn’t want to get wet today since we were flying back home and would end up traveling almost 20 hours to get home! So we asked for a late check out of our hotel so we could shower and change before starting our trek.
Our day started off early again with the driver picking us up at 8 AM. But today we would cross over to Brazil to see the Falls on that side so we had to bring our passports. The driver collected them all and took them in at the border so they could process all of us on our bus at once. But that took about 40 mins coming in to Brazil and almost an hour coming back in to Argentina.
But it was all worth it! The views on the Brazilian side were just as awesome if not better than the Argentinian side. The whole area just blows you aware with the sheer beauty and power of that much water dropping down that fast.
We got back to the hotel by about 2:00 and had until 3:15 to shower and change. The driver picked us up and got us to the Iguazú airport in plenty of time but then we found out our flight was delayed by an hour! Now we were starting to get worried about whether we’d make our connecting flight to the US since we had to be picked up at one Buenos Aries airport and transported to another. I felt like we were in that movie “Planes, Trains and Automobiles”!
The driver met us right when we got off but then was confused since he thought he was supposed to take Sue and Stuart to their hotel first (they were staying an extra day in Buenos Aires) rather than take us to the airport first so we got stuck in all the downtown traffic on Saturday night and again thought we’d miss our flight!
But luckily we got there just in time to check in and get our standby seats. Whew! The flight from Buenos Aires to JFK in New York was LONG! We wanted to take the flight to Miami since it was shorter but it was too tight.
We got to JFK and easily whisked thru customs and border control (International Travel Tip – if you don’t have it already, sign up for Global Entry) since it literally took us seconds to go thru vs what looked like a good half hour wait if you didn’t have it. Got all our luggage and rebooked it thru to Charlotte. Then we found out the fun news. Our flight to Charlotte was delayed two hours and was now leaving at 12:20 PM. So we think we’ll get home around 3:30 PM which will have us traveling for about 26 straight hours and that’s after we walked around the Iguazu waterfalls in the morning!
Speaking of which, I’ll include some pictures from yesterday morning’s walk around the Brazilian side of the Falls. I’ll send one last blog entry on Monday to finish off this trip. Hope everyone had a great weekend!
The Wandering Italian 