And the adventure continues...

Hi all. For those of you who don't know yet, we're posting to tell you of the latest test to our sanity. Because I will now be starting school in the fall, we needed to move up our date of departure from Brazil drastically. We were originally scheduled to fly home September 27. Now, my school begins August 21, so Sept. is looking a little late. No problem. Our plane tickets (United Airlines bought cheap through the Student Travel Association) were super flexible. Refundable, flexible dates, only a measly $25 dollar fee if you wanted to change the flight dates. So piece of cake, right?

It turns out that our tickets are "student class" which means to exchange them for others, the new tickets also must be "student class." Unfortunately, July and August are prime travel times for students in the U.S. and we were quickly informed that there was not a single ticket available for us for the entire months of July and August. Nothing until mid-September...which pretty much put us right back where we started. We discovered, to our surprise, that "refundable" tickets are only refundable before you begin your trip...once you've traveled on them, they cannot refund the second half of the trip to you. We even tried to go over STA's heads and speak directly with United Airlines. We begged to be allowed to bump our class and pay extra for regular coach seats, but no one would budge. The awful thing was that we knew there were seats available on these flights...we checked. But apparently for "student class" tickets, conditions had to be just right to allow us to change. So in actuality, they would rather send a plane from Rio to the USA with empty seats then put us in them. Not a fun situation to be in.

We were told by both STA and United to start looking for one-way tickets if we had to home that soon. They were only running at about $1400 for this time of year. We both began racking our brains for a solution. We asked about changing departure city from somewhere else in Brazil, and even told them that could then dump us in any major US city if that would help. But, all United flights into and out of the country have to go through São Paulo, and those were precisely the ones with "no room" for us.

Unsure if bank robbery or credit card theft was the better way to go in order to come up with enough money for one-way tickets, we stumbled down to Chalé, our corner bar to formulate a plan. And soon enough, Stefan had one...if we couldn't change our departure city for a new flight out of Brazil, maybe we should try something farther away....like another country. And there you have it...we are going to Argentina.

We called STA right away with our plan, and it turns out there was plenty of room for us on a flight out of Buenos Aires. And the price difference for the ticket switch was only $100, much more my price range than a $1400 one-way. Now there's just the matter of getting to Buenos Aires. It will take us 33 hours by bus. That's right, 33 hours from Rio. But we're actually quite excited about it. We've decided to break the trip up into two smaller chunks. We plan on taking a bus to the Brazilian/Argentine border and stopping for a couple nights at the Foz do Iguaçu, one of the biggest waterfalls in the world, located in a national park. Then off to Buenos Aires, where we will stay four nights to explore the city. It should be interesting switching from Portuguese to Spanish when we get to Argentina...I think my head might explode.

And after this little adventure...home on July 31!

Our new flight information for anyone who's interested:

Sun, Jul 30-Mon Jul 31: United Airlines, UA 0846
From: Buenos Aires (EZE), Argentina
Departs: 9:05 pm Sun, Jul 30

To: Washington Dulles, DC (IAD)
Arrives: 6:42 am Mon, Jul 31

Flight: 10 hours, 37 minutes

Mon, Jul 31: United Airlines, UA 7201
From: Washington Dullus DC (IAD)
Departs: 8:35 am

To: Atlanta, GA (ATL)
Arrives: 10:32 am

Flight: 1 hour and 57 minutes