The Longest Travel Day Ever

The day finally arrived for us to leave the antipodes and it was a bittersweet day indeed. We are quite in love with the land of the long white cloud and while we were excited for the next leg of our adventure, there was a sadness to be leaving the islands on which we had spent the last 2.5 months. We all agreed that if life in Crested Butte does not work out as envisioned, we will figure out how to return to New Zealand, setting up home in Wanaka or Raglan to give the Kiwi life a go. 

It turns out it is a long way from New Zealand to Ecuador with no easy itinerary connecting the two, so we’d settled on the lesser of all the evils in the form of an overnight flight from Auckland to Santiago, an afternoon/night spent in Santiago followed by a 6 am flight to Panama before finally limping our way back south to Quito. We figured we’d exhaust ourselves as much as possible and take advantage of one final beach day before flying out, which we successfully accomplished in the form of a 2-hour surf lesson for Holden followed by about 2 hours of surfing/boogie boarding/raging on the beach for the boys. A quick hose-shower at the beach, a sandwich and a final real fruit cone and we were off to the airport, ready to collapse onto our airplane and hopefully sleep for at least some of the 12 hours to Santiago. Just as we are preparing to board our plane at 6pm, all lined up at the gate, Will’s phone dings with a delay announcement. We look around and no one seems to be doing anything different, the gate agents haven’t registered a change and the monitors are still showing the same information. I sneak around to a gate agent to ask, and he concedes that yes, we are indeed delayed till 8:30, though doesn’t make a move to let any of the hundreds of people waiting people know. We decide to find some dinner while we wait it out and fill ourselves up on ramen and bao buns while 8:30 comes and goes. Still no change on the monitor, and still no announcement or update on our flight status. I walk back to the gate and there isn’t a Latam agent anywhere to be found, just a bunch of frustrated people milling about. We try calling the airline, no one answers. We try to find an agent, but none seem to exist.

Boys are starting to fall apart a little bit by now so we find a lounge and set them up with a movie while we start hunting for nearby airport hotels, just in case. We call the first one, booked. The second one, booked. The third fourth fifth sixth….all booked. Finally, one of the receptionists tells us that there is an Ed Sherhan and Elton John concert that evening and 30,000 people have descended on Auckland, meaning there isn’t an empty bed within a 50-mile radius. At this point it’s 11 pm and still no word from Latam. We get the boys nestled into a makeshift couch-bed and settle in to wait. At about 11:30 an announcement comes through that the flight is delayed till 7:30 the next day and you can hear a collective sigh from everyone in the lounge as we all shuffle around a bit settling in for the night.  We close our eyes and try to drift off when all the sudden we’re shaken awake by a screeching lounge agent yelling that they are closing and we all need to leave immediately. It’s 1:30 am. I look around at the 30 some other people being shaken awake, all of whom are dreary, confused and trying to process what is happening. Next to us is a 90-year-old woman in a wheelchair who had finally found some comfort and sleep, and her caregiver who didn’t appear super amused at the idea of waking and moving her once again. Chaos descends with lots of arguing and yelling between agents and passengers, largely in Spanish (Latam being a Chilean airline), nobody fully understanding what’s happening, until security guards are called in and we’re told we have to please go to the food court, the only open allowable place in the airport, for the remainder of the night. It takes 3 people to help wake and lift our wheel-chair bound neighbor, which the security guards simply watched, arms crossed in front of them.

We wake the boys up the best we can, bundle them up and lead their wobbly-selves downstairs to the aforementioned food court where Will finds us a few plastic couches we cover in clothes from our bags and nestle the boys in as best we can. About 2 am we drift off for 2 blissful hours of hard, cold, plastic filled sleep before the food court opens for the morning at 4 am with rock music blaring and a cacophony of coffee grinders announcing the start of the day. Still unable to find anyone from Latam and not sure what time our flight will leave, we spend the next few hours in a daze, wandering the airport eating pancakes and hot cocoa, beginning to laugh at the absurdity of the situation. Around 8 we wander back to the gate to see if we can glean any information, and all the sudden, with no announcement or change to the monitor they start boarding the plane. We jubilantly jump aboard, to then wait on the tarmac for another hour.  Finally, 15 hours after originally planned, we were off to Santiago. Not a great start to an already hellacious itinerary. We passed the 12 hours in the air oscillating between fitful sleep and lots of movies and arrived in Santiago at 3 am to another barren, mostly closed airport. Completely disoriented and exhausted at this point, we pass the next few hours doing laps around the moving walkways and terminals of the sleepy airport till it’s time for our next flight, a short 6.5 hour hop over to Panama. The miracle of the whole situation is that because of our original bizarre itinerary that had us spending 17 hours in Santiago, our pre-existing connections and flights were unaffected by our epic Auckland delay. We arrive in Panama to a 6-hour layover, the absurdity and exhausting extent of the travel day leaving us slap happy and loopy and kill another epic quantity of time wandering a random airport.

We finally hobbled into Quito at 5 pm, 45 hours after leaving Raglan and 52 hours after any of us had been in a bed. To say we were disheveled would be an understatement…we were a mess. Wrinkled clothes and tired eyes, messy hair and rather beleaguered. We needed a quick dinner and an immediate transition to bed. As we headed to the elevator in our hotel, we passed an Andean-inspired restaurant and figured perfect, we could grab a bite and meet our bags in the room for a much needed shower and change of clothes. As the maître d is showing us to our table, Will notices a rack of blue blazers available for poorly attired guests to wear. Hmmmmmm…..We’re then taken for a tour of the wine collection and shown the prized 9-year-aged leg of Jamon Iberico that is sold by the gram… I look at the 4 of us, wrinkled, dirty, haggard and a complete mess and realize we’re desperately out of place, but somehow they welcome us right on in. We sat down and the most elaborate 2+ hour meal of our entire trip thus ensued, complete with platters of Jamon, glass after glass of paired wines, tableside mole sauces ground in volcanic mortars and scallops seared in front of us. There was nothing to do but lean in, enjoy and indulge and let the food and wine wash away the previous blur of hours into a delicious, spicy, hedonistic blur. We made it.