Home Again

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Our whirlwind tour of Buenos Aires with Gord and Leslie ends today. We're heading home via Panama City flying business class on COPA airlines. This time we're just going to change planes and not stay longer in Panama City. On the way we had stayed for a couple of nights at the Evenia.

The day starts in Buenos Aires, as most do, with figuring out our cash supply. We want to have enough cash to pay and tip our Uber driver who will take us to the airport but do not want to have any Argentine pesos left to take home. Gord, our kindly banker, has it all figured out for us. He arranges for a Uber driver to take us the 20-30 minutes out of the city to the Buenos Aires Ezeiza Airport (EZE). Gord and Leslie see us off when the Uber arrives — many thanks to both of them for all of their help and hospitality.

It's mostly an expressway out of the city to the airport with a few tolls along the way. Most of the city is neat, clean and quite modern. There are a few rough spots but not too many, it's a fairly prosperous looking city.  However, Gord has noted that you don't see any cranes dotting the skyline — it's an indication that the economy is in trouble and no one is investing/building in the city.

The Uber driver, a young woman, has a very nice car and drops us off in plenty of time. The airport is not very big and we struggle a bit to find our way to the COPA check in counter.  We have an agent take Kate in a wheelchair to our gate and we tip him with the last of our Argentine pesos. There is a lounge we could go to but it's a long way from our gate so we pass on that; our flight leaves soon enough and we can get a drink and food on the plane.

From the air we have good views of the sprawling city and fly over Tigre and the Delta area where we had visited earlier. We fly over Bolivia and the upper reaches of the Amazon basin. We are served another nice meal with proper plates and cutlery. We have some wine with our meal service and watch more of our Netflix movies. Reg watches the Marilyn Monroe story "Blonde" (2022) which is a really sad story. I had always believed that Joe DiMaggio was a saint, not so in this telling. 

"There is a place, where you can go, where Marilyn's still dancing with DiMaggio ..."

... from Marilyn & Joe by Kinky Friedman (1983)

At Panama City, from the air, we can again see all the ships lined up for the canal passage. We arrive at Terminal 2 (the new terminal) and again need to transfer the considerable distance to Terminal 1. And again it's a bit of struggle to get a chair and an agent to take Kate but one arrives in due course and strikes out at break neck speed. Reg struggles to keep up and lags far behind. But we both know where we're going so not to worry, if lags he can follow the signs. The fellow pushing Kate actually stops at critical junctions to make sure Reg is still on track but he's often quite a bit ahead.

Our flight home is uneventful with another meal, more Netflix movies and we arrive in Toronto around midnight on time as expected. Kate recalls that the plane was pretty run down and the seats not very comfortable — especially for business class.

We take a taxi to our hotel, the Hilton Doubletree, and are charged an exorbitant fee for this luxury (I was expecting a $20 fare, he wanted $40 and we ended up paying with US cash). At checkin we discover that the free hotel shuttle runs all night long and we could have taken that instead. We're tired and to bed — we'll drive home tomorrow.

It is winter in Canada with snow on the ground. But it's much worse across the border in Buffalo. They're currently under 6' of lake effect snow and more is on the way. An emergency has been declared there and it will take some time to dig out.

The picture above shows the snow accumulation on our deck when we arrived home — quite a difference from the warm sunny spring weather in Buenos Aires, Argentina where the Jacaranda and Bougainvillea are in bloom!