The Great Escape....

I didn’t sleep much, as I was quite antsy about whether our trip would happen or not. We had already decided we would head back to Santiago if we had to stay another day. Finally dozed off, only to awaken with a start because I thought we had overslept, when in reality, as a sleepy Rebe reminded me, my phone was an hour ahead of time.

So we got up and headed out at 6:30 a.m. Luckily, we had already paid for our room. Pues, we get to the gate and its locked! We HAD to be at the bus station before 7:30, or the bus would leave us. So I fit my hand through the gate and rang the doorbell repeatedly, hoping that maybe one of the staff would be sleeping in the house and would hear it. We could hear the ringing back at the house, but no response. So we headed back into the house and began to look behind the desk and stuff. I found some random keys, so I ran outside with them and tried to fit them with no avail. BTW – the fence was like double my height, and the bars couldn’t even fit my arm through them, so we couldn’t get out that way. Finally, I remembered that there had to be a buzzer somewhere, just like in the Roadhouse office. So we found the phone, located outside. Rebe stayed by the house, and when I got to the gate and rang the doorbell, she unlocked it and then ran down to where I was holding the door open.

It was actually quite invigorating, but I can’t believe they locked it. You just can’t lock people up like that.

So we were behind schedule, but we booked it to the bus station, with me taking front with the directions and Rebe the blackbelt staying aware of our surroundings. It was a good team effort. We huffingly made it to the CATA box, pleadingly looked at the lady (same as the day before), and were told that the pass had been opened! We high-fixed, then regained our composure. We bought our tickets and were on the bus within 10 minutes. From Vina to Santiago we were the only passengers. So even though our seats were in the back, we sat in the front on the second story, which basically means we were in front of a window and the passing scenery looked more like an Imax.

Customs stop still took about 2 hours, and this time it was a lot colder, but we just watched Enchanted from my iPod while we were in the terminally slow lines. The movie they showed after customs was hilariously bad/cheesy, and I just have to put up this line so I don’t forget it. “where I come from they didn’t give us names. I was given the number 47”….. “Well…..that explains a lot.” Then we watched a horrible movie called blind, where everyone, duh, goes blind.

We left the Mendoza station at 7:30 that night, excited to be halfway home!! We had a good chicken dinner, and then pretty much tried to sleep. It was hard, after having ridden in better overnight seats, to go back to semi-cama, but I managed to dose for a while.

We arrived in Buenos Aires around 7:30 a.m., took a taxi home, showered, and I was asleep for a while.