Buenos Aires or Bust

Buenos Aires or Bust isn't just a fun title.  It shouldn't come as a big surprise to people that a vacation to Antarctica is not cheap. So not being there on time when the ship sails would be a very expensive mistake. Unlike cruises to more popular destinations you can't just hop on a plane and catch up with the ship at the next port of call. There aren't any commercial airstrips in Antarctica, so if you're not on board when the ship leaves Ushuaia that's the end of it.

When I was looking at flight options I noticed that direct flights from New York to Buenos Aires were pretty thin on the ground. There seems to be one direct flight daily, which leaves JFK late at night and arrives in Buenos Aires mid-morning on the following day. The original itinerary had us flying from Montreal to JFK on Feb 14th, taking the flight to Buenos Aires on the evening of the 14th and arriving mid-morning on the 15th.  Then on the 16th we had an 8.55am flight to Ushuaia, which would get us there with a couple of hours to spare before boarding the ship.  I realized that if our flight out of Montreal was delayed for some reason and we missed our connection then we would have to wait 24 hours for the next fight to Buenos Aires. That flight wouldn't get us in until mid morning on the 16th - after the plane to Ushuaia had left! Even if there were alternative non-direct flights to get us to Buenos Aires, the additional travel time involved in making the extra connections might still not get us in on time. With this in mind, Denise and I decided to travel on the 13th instead and spend an extra day in Buenos Aires. This would allow us to see a bit more of the city, and set our minds at rest that even if we missed one connection we still had an extra 24 hours travel time in hand to make it to Ushuaia on time.

I am so glad we made that decision, because traveling today has not gone as planned. I can't imagine how stressed out I would have been if we had not had an extra 24 hours in hand. We got to Montreal airport nice and early, only to find that our 5pm flight from to JFK had been cancelled. Being early was a blessing, as the check-in attendant was able to rebook us on an earlier flight to JFK. The earlier flight was supposed to leave at 1pm, but was running late and was now scheduled to leave at 3.45pm.  It seemed to take ages for our flights to get re-organized. Then the 3.45 flight was delayed again, and we only finally left Montreal at 5pm (the original time our cancelled flight was due to leave). At least the flight to Buenos Aires left JFK on time, and I don't have any other connections to worry about.
The flight from JFK to Buenos Aires is a long one: 10 and 3/4 hours. It may very well be the longest flight I've ever been on, the previous record being held by a direct flight from London to San Francisco 20 years ago. I meant to write a blog entry part way through our plane journey, but we really didn't have much luck with the wifi connections along the way. JFK had no wifi at all. There is wifi available on this flight, but they want to charge you money for it, so I'm sitting here composing this entry in Notepad, and I shall post it when we land - assuming the hotel has working wifi that is! For now I'm off to try and catch a few zzzs.