Nearly Home

We have now made it as far as Lethbridge in our quest for home. It has been a long trip to say the least. I am eternally grateful to Mom and Dad for providing a bathtub (heaven) and bed (more heaven). We started out at 6am AT+1 getting up and leaving the ship at 7:30. We then took a tour of Valparaiso, Santiago and the wine and veggie growing areas in between the 2 cities. It was really wonderful and informative but at 6:00 that day we were dropped at the airport and then sat around there until our flight was called at 9. We then climbed in the plane and prepared to leave South America behind. It taxied, lined up, powered up, started to run and then shut down, taxied back to the terminal, unloaded the luggage, had a fire sensor in the luggage compartment fixed and finally managed to get out and take off nearly TWO HOURS late. Ugh. 12 hours later we landed in Toronto where we managed to miss our connecting flight because our flight was late and Air Canada (motto: we're not happy till YOU'RE not happy) was inefficient and Customs was indifferent. We then got to stand in a few more lines for a couple hours to reschedule our flight and managed to get on a 10:00 flight so we thought that wasn;t too bad. So we waited, got on our flight, taxied out to the line up of planes (did I mention it was snowing heavily in Toronto?) waiting for deicing and were told we were 15th in line. We then were sent to a DIFFERENT line where we waited some more,finally got deiced (for which we are appropriately grateful) and were allowed to take off - an hour and a half late. After that we had smooth sailing - our flight arrived, my parents were waiting to haul us off, our luggage came out first, we drove to Lethbridge and we are now somewhat rested and ready to take the last leg of the epic journey and drive home.

Within a day or 2 I hope to post a bunch of picture so you can see some of the sights we saw. Thanks for following along and for your comments and patience and all that. Talk you you all soon.

Dale and MArsha