The Longest Day

 

Travel is a great opportunity to test out your patience and the team travelling to Bahia Blanca Argentina for the Patagonia cup know plenty about this now after what seems like three days of travelling.

 

The NZ leg was the smoothest part with Jetstar getting us all to Auckland with plenty of the original schedule left to transfer to the international terminal. Unfortunately that was where the smooth sailing ended as we proceeded to take three days to get to Argentina. Lan Chile informed us that the flight to Santiago Chile would be delayed by 4 hours due to the late arrival of our aircraft at Sydney on route to Auckland. This meant a wait in the international terminal lounge area for the boys which unknown to us would become a theme for the next few days.

 

The late take off meant we could no longer land in Santiago and catch our connecting flights to Buenos Aires. Lan Chile would have to put us in a hotel for the night and fly us the next day. This seemed reasonable but we have discovered that bus transport is also a slow process so we waited 2 hours outside the Santiago Airport for a bus that never came and eventually were shuffled into taxis to the city. They did put us in the Crowne Plaza Hotel where we were feed and watered and scheduled on three flights along with the HSOB rugby guys that we are travelling with the next day.

Bus transport again took its time and we waited two more hours to be returned to the Santiago airport. Thank goodness for one of the rugby guys who is from Uruguay and speaks Spanish or we might still be in Chile!

 

We were finally on a plane to Argentina where upon arrival we found that Board member, Jeremy Phillips, had the misfortune of not seeing his bag come off the carousel and had to alert the airport staff that it was not on our plane. The irony being Jeremy had been given all the luggage tags and had been heard previously uttering a phrase he had learned in Spanish which contained the words no problemo. So as I write this we are due to catch a nine hour bus from Buenos Aires to Bahia Blanca, without Jeremy’s luggage, and will get in about 7am on the day of the first game. Effectively we have been travelling since Thursday 11am NZ time which is now 1:37 pm Saturday NZ time and we still have 9 hours to go.

 

The boys are all in good spirits though and hopefully we can get enough rest to shake off the cobwebs to play the top team in the tournament Villa Mitre 9pm tomorrow night. Could be worse the rugby guys have to play at 2pm.

 

Adios Amigos

 

Terry