A 10+2 hour flight
Home: Jim and Louise’s House

Part of the value of our first-floor AirBNB was the ease at which we would be able to take our bikes out to range across the large-but-bikeable city. For the first week the bikes remained packed, and while I could imagine times when they would be useful or more-efficient, I also knew it would be more work to re-build and de-build them, so they remained untouched for our two months in Buenos Aires.

That “status quo” assumption was nearly our undoing. Just take the same boxes we brought into Buenos Aires out of Buenos Aires, right? Wrong. The day before our flight, I finally remembered that we’d had a generous allowance of 3 checked bags into BA: a bike, a large pannier, and a custom box I’d built large enough to only hold the remainder we couldn’t carry on. Now on our international (Delta) flight, we were back to the standard where two checked bags are reasonable, but a 3rd is an additional $200. Since we were returning “home”, I was able to get rid of enough stuff that I was likely to dispose of anyway to squeeze everything I needed to into my existing cardboard box. But Rett (especially with some BA acquisitions) had no chance. It was my fault for not remembering the change, so I figured we’d just have to pay the exorbitant price.

But I went out anyway, managed to scrounge up a good-sized box, a bunch of little bottles of glue, and some cheap tape. I spent the rest of the evening expanding Rett’s box, and also reinforcing the hole-cut “handles” on all of our boxes (by laminating Trix cereal box pieces onto both inside and outside). The next morning, the cheap tape was revealed to be nearly-worthless, and a mad dash to find proper tape at a hardware store failed because we had disposed of the last of our Argentine Pesos at dinner the night before. That’s when our AirBNB hostess showed up to get the key, simultaneous with our airport transfer van. Thankfully, our hostess walked back over to a hardware store with me (and even paid for the tape), and our driver didn’t seem too bothered by us making him wait. But it was still a much more chaotic and stressful departure than I had hoped for after two months of relaxation.

Our driver took us out on the highway past miles of high-rise neighborhoods we hadn’t come anywhere near before, to EZE, the international airport. It wasn’t until we were inside the terminal that I had a chance to retape all of our boxes. That actually allowed time for the line to shrink, and check-in went smoothly, with only a wait for someone to guide us (along with a few others) to the oversized baggage area to drop off our bike boxes.

While we were waiting, the owner of another crumpled bike box we had seen passed by. Wait: “Katie? From Alaska?” Yes, she confirmed, slightly bewildered, and we only had a brief moment to let her know why this strange man in the Buenos Aires airport knew her name. She is one of a couple I had been following, also on crazyguyonabike.com, who had done the full ride multi-continent ride from Alaska to Ushuaia (and then some!) I knew they had been close to finishing at Ushuaia, but it was quite an unexpected coincidence that after all this time of “following” them, we were both leaving South America on the same day. I had recognized her from pictures in her boyfriend’s journal; a unique thing about them is that they both kept separate journals of their travels. It showed how our readers might get quite a different picture if Rett kept a journal, since their descriptions of the same events were often quite different, in a very enlightening way!

One last concern was our legality. We had entered Argentina on February 22nd, at the remote Lago del Desierto border station. Argentina has an online form where you can enter your information and it tells you the date your entry expires. I assumed we had been granted the standard 90 days, but the border agent hadn’t specified, and the online form only returned “not found”. This wasn’t initially concerning, since the agent had recorded our information with pen-and-paper, and presumably it took some time for someone to transport the log book across the lake and enter it into a computer somewhere. But as more time passed and we still didn’t appear, it seemed more likely that someone had made a transcription error in the at-least-two times copying of our passport numbers and birthdates. We were leaving with several days left on our hoped-for 90-day entry, but what would the immigration agent think if we didn’t appear in their system? Thankfully, I checked a few days before our departure, and suddenly we appeared. And with the expected 90-day duration. Phew. For some reason the automated kiosks at the airport didn’t work for us, so we had to see a human agent, but he passed us through in seconds with no issue.

At carry-on screening, they wanted to open my bag to inspect the two foldable bike locks that I put in there, as they always do. But this time, the young security agent refused to allow them through. Damn. Well, at least the 5-year-old locks had been having problems with their folding joints, but I certainly hadn’t been planning on replacing them. He also took one of the spare brake cables (though ignored another), something no one had done before either. Then at the gate, there was oddly another manual inspection of everyone’s carry-ons as we boarded, and any filled water bottles had to be drained again. When the gate agent scanned our boarding passes, both Rett and I were directed to another agent, who asked us a couple questions, and then finally we were on our way back to the United States.

It all supported my idea to try a new method of travel when we head for Europe!

Our first flight leg was quite long, and highlighted how far south we had traveled. Because even with the 3-hour northward flight to Buenos Aires from our last riding point, it was still another 10 hours to Atlanta, much longer than the 7-hour flight from Atlanta to Lima, Peru had been. We had only a short stop in Atlanta, where we had to manage to collect our baggage, pass through customs, and re-check it before running to the next plane to Chicago. Thankfully Atlanta’s super-efficient layout made this easy, and immigration/customs was so automated and invisible, we didn’t even know we had passed through it! Quite a contrast from what we had been fearing on our return to our home country after a year away filled with many immigration-related horror stories.

We chose to each gate-check a large pannier when they were looking for volunteers, just because it’s not as easy to walk through an airport with a pannier as it is with a roller-bag, and we would need to collect all our other checked baggage anyway. This was the final baggage indignity, as my toiletry bag that is velcro-ed to the outside of that pannier had disappeared on pickup (which I didn’t notice until we got home). It likely just got torn off at some point, though if someone took it, they didn’t get much beyond an old toothbrush. Much worse is that I no longer have that vital external bag, but that’s a problem for another day.

At least a month ago, Rett came up with the mouth-watering idea of going to Taco Bell for our first lunch after our morning flight arrived in Chicago, and that’s exactly what we did. And it was amazing. U-S-A! U-S-A! After just 2 weeks short of a full year away, it’s good to be home!

Our two months in Buenos Aires had given plenty of time for summer to arrive in Chicago, and our “Christmas in July” (er, May), where my parents’ house gets flooded by Amazon deliveries, was perhaps even more-extreme than usual, given our year-long absence and the difficulty of acquiring replacement gear in South America.

Re-connecting with family and friends was still the most-valuable gift, with the highlight being an overnight trip to Bloomington, Indiana for a mini-reunion with a portion of my Dad’s side of our family. It was a nice mirror to our reunion two summers ago with my Mom’s Wisconsin side of our family, and we’re lucky that we’ve been able to time these gatherings that let us connect in an efficient way that fits inside the brief windows that open in our nomadic lives.

I had a lot less work to do than our last stay (no need to build two whole new wheelsets for us, we’re just sticking with our “new” 650b/55mm setup I built for South America), but I was still busy. My biggest project was sewing new zipper sliders into our tent to replace the failed ones. I debated just replacing the entire tent (Big Agnes Copper Spur 3 Long), since it’s had enough other repairs on it, but the current model being rectangular (rather than trapezoidal), and thus requiring a new footprint, was enough to annoy me into the repair option. Upon opening up the seams and getting the old sliders off (and observing that Big Agnes definitely didn’t design this tent with ease-of-slider-replacement in mind!), it was at least quite clear that the sliders were the problem. The metal on the insides had been worn down into completely different shapes, so I now really understand how squeezing the sliders with pliers can work in an emergency, but is definitely not a long-term solution.

Even with the more “relaxed” stay, our month with Mom & Dad still passed far too quickly. We all agree that visiting with a higher frequency but shorter duration would be preferred, so we’re grateful that they’re willing to adapt to the low-frequency/long-duration visits that result from our chosen lifestyle. Though now that we all have years of experience, I’m proud of how well we have all adapted to the strange structure of living together.