Madrid to Santiago, Chile

October 12, 2024- from the itinerary: catch the 12:30 Iberia flight to Santiago and sit on the plane for 13 hours.

Stay at the airport Holiday Inn

Weather: cool and rainy

Had a nice lie-in until about 7:30 and trundled down to breakfast.

They have a big spread

 and their omelette (tortilla in Spanish) was pretty good. I’m trying to be reasonably good on this trip, so actually had a salad for breakfast

Got to the airport in good time with a couple hours for champagne in the lounge.

Here is our luggage for 2 for 16 days. Tomorrow I will do a special post on how to pack for such a journey and use only 1 backpack…

The weather deteriorated and pissed down. It was interesting to notice the transport for those with disabilities didn’t have any cover, so the cripples got soaked as they were brought down the ramp.

I wish I had a picture of this- there was a young lady walking by with, what I hope was a Brazilian butt lift. If it wasn’t, she had a huge deformity….

Chris bought a bunch of Iberia ham and olives in case they didn’t feed us enough on the plane. Here is the plane.

We flew business/first class. On this configuration we don’t sit next to each other so we can both have a nice window seat. You can see Chris 2 rows behind.

Here is my (poor) attempt at an influencer pose…

This was probably one of the dirtiest cabins I’d been on for awhile and my towelette came back filthy.

The menu was rather uninspired, but did include “homemade” octopus pie… I thought that’s something Vena might try and then chose the omelette.

That said, I did go with the hake which was ok.

Actual flight time was “only” 12.5 hours. I watched

5 movies and didn’t sleep.

Arriving at the Santiago airport, we managed to beat the LATAM flight, and about 4 other flights, so we were thankfully towards the front of what turned into an extremely long passport control line. This was because they only had 1 persons checking passports. Figure it takes a couple minutes per person with 400 people in line…well… you get the picture. After about 15 minutes they finally put on a second person and we were finally cleared after waiting only 45 minutes….

The Holiday Inn was a short walk from the terminal. We had another 15 minute wait while the checkin clerk (again there was only 1) had to patiently explain, and look into, why a young man’s reservation was for November 12, not October 12, and that the hotel was fully booked…finally a Second Lady came out to help with the line of 12 people waiting to get their rooms….

We’ve stayed here at least 3 other times. The rooms aren’t stellar, but they are convenient

And we knew we were in South America when we had our pisco sours. We felt we had finally started our vacation!