Ushuaia

On Saturday we arrived back to Port in Ushuaia. Most of the time now I can properly pronounce this southernmost city. There is another town further south, but as our guide Melody told us, Ushuaia is the southernmost city.

We docked around 530pm, and after dinner, my sister and I decided to go for a little walk into the city. Mom was going to join us, but it was windy, with people having difficulty walking on the pier. So we ventured in to walk one of the main strips. We got back around 730pm and headed to the Aula with mom to watch another documentary on research in Antarctica. Then is was time to prep our bags to have them out of our stateroom doors by 10pm. One last sleep on the ship!

Sunday, we went up for a quick breakfast before grabbing our carry on bags. We then joined others for our 720am bus ride for a tour of Tierra del Fuego national park. We enjoyed 3 stops within the park, and then proceeded to the Ushuaia airport to take our flight from Ushuaia to Buenos Aires. The Viking staff was great at helping us gather our checked bag from our charter flight and guiding us over to the check in counters for our next flights. We were there around 430pm, and the American ticket counter opened at 5pm (United opened at 6pm so they had a longer time to wait). We had plenty of time, since our next flight was at 10pm!

After getting our bags checked in, we proceeded to security and passport control. I was able to go with mom through an expedited lane, while my sister went the normal route. Fortunately my sister has lounge access which was right across from our gate, so we hung out there for a few hours before boarding out flight to Dallas.

Upon arriving in Dallas we headed to passport control. Mom and I went the regular way (since the Mobile Passport Control wasn’t open), and my sister with global entry went that way. She headed down to gather our bags, and my mom and I met her there. Then through customs (nothing to declare here!), loaded our bags on the belt to be checked back in, and then out to go through TSA security.

We made it back to San Francisco safe and sound. Gathered our luggage and proceeded to the curb to be greeted by our favorite ride-share driver (aka my brother in law). Then is was back to their place to watch the AFC Championship game!

I’ll be working on uploading all the photos and videos to Dropbox over the next few days, and will be tweaking the blog entries to organize things a little better, and I’ll likely add some more info. As I mentioned in a previous post, this trip was never on my radar, yet it was a truly amazing trip, made even better by sharing it with my mom and my sister. My mom was a trooper, and impressed so many passengers and crew with her determination to experience it all!