Birch Bay - Hurray!

It's been a busy 48 hours or so. We disembarked from Insignia at Valparaiso Sunday morning, took the Oceania bus to a Santiago hotel for part of the day, followed by a delayed flight on Air Canada to Buenos Aires.

After a final lovely lunch Monday in Buenos Aires (details to follow) we caught the United flight to IAD (Washington-Dulles), complete with a case of wine. After a relatively great sleep on that overnight flight, we arrived in good time at Dulles, sped through Immigration and Customs without a hitch - or any duty on our wine - and caught our flight to LAX (Los Angeles).

That flight landed early and we enjoyed the 10-minute walk from the United terminal to the Alaska terminal rather than waiting for a shuttle bus. Here our only hitch of the day occurred. After trying to check in at a machine without success a couple of times, we realized we had booked the Alaska flight for Wednesday instead of Tuesday. D'oh!

Luckily for us, there was room on today's flights and for a relatively modest change fee (okay, it hurt a little bit) we flew the rest of the way today.

The planes have gotten progressively smaller as we journeyed from Santiago to Bellingham, from the AC 777 to the UA 767s EZE-IAD-LAX, to the Alaska 737-400 LAX-SEA, followed by the 92-mile hop on a Bombardier twin-prop to Bellingham.

We picked up our rental car (fortunately available a day early as well at no extra charge), and are now getting ready for what we hope will be a good night's sleep at home!

Since there's not a sign of red fluid on the outside of our wine box, we'll unpack that, along with a pile of dirty clothes, in the morning.

As always, it's nice to be home...