At least I made Buenos Aires

(Sunrise over South America)

Well, that was quite a hellish flight. Maybe not the worst, but definitely in the top two. Yet, I arrived in Buenos Aires... finally. And made it past the unexpected $140US entry tariff (thankfully good for the next 10 years) and through the ginormous customs line. Unfortunately, because of my predicament I didn't have any time to explore BA as I originally intended. Instead, I had to hop on a bus to the domestic airport to attempt to get a new connection to Mendoza. Thankfully, a sweet woman at the tourist desk in the international airport wrote a note in Spanish for me to show to the ticket agent, explaining my situation, just in case I couldn't get by with my extremely limited Spanish. Thankfully, I didn't need it.

(Aeroparque Jorge Newbury, BA)

The first agent was able to get me on the standby list to Mendoza. She explained that all the flights were full. Fine. I'll take it. Then, somewhere between the bathroom, a failed attempt using the ATM, another failed attempt to reach Bank of America via their international collect call line and trying to find security I realized that my boarding pass had mysteriously disappeared, but all the other documents it was with were still in my possession. Now, I didn't get a wink of sleep on the flight so I've been up for well over 24 hours straight and traveling for over 40 hours at this point, so I'm a little fried. But I kept calm and went back to the ticketing counter. That bonehead move of losing the boarding pass might have just turned my travel luck around for the better. This agent realized that all of my internal flights had been cancelled since I missed the first one yesterday. She was kind and patient enough to reissue all four of those flights for me and she even procured me a seat on the 3:30 PM flight to Mendoza. Bye bye stand by! Things are starting to look up, I think.