November 28, 2025

Kansas City, MO > Houston, TX > Santiago, Chile

Travel Day

Hopefully you aren’t suffering from a Thanksgiving Day food hangover. Today starts the first leg of our Antarctica adventure. It is a long way from Kansas City to Santiago Chile. It is approximately 11,300 km (7,000 miles) from Kansas City, MO to Santiago, Chile as the crow flys. Unfortunately, no airline takes that short route.

Slept well last night but still got up early. This apartment is fine except for the fact that the bedroom doesn’t have any heat. Everything is packed and ready. How we have so much stuff is hard to believe. We are leaving a few things here in Kansas City as we are returning here in 18 days.

Rochelle picked us up just before 10:00 and took us back to her house. Our flight is at 15:00 but Mary wants to get there a little early to check in with Clear. Clear is apparently included in our American Express Card’s plan, and since it is there we might as well use it. We left the house after saying goodbye to everyone just before it went noon.

Traffic is light. It is Black Friday so there is some traffic, but one could suppose that people are already at the malls by noon. It only takes us about forty-five minutes to get to the airport. We are on a United Flight the first leg of which is Kansas City to Houston. We got a message that they changed the equipment and reassigned our seats. No big deal, but now it is a smaller aircraft with less overhead bin space, so the decision to check both of our bags is a good one. It makes it much easier traveling with just my backpack anyway.

Of course, since we have plenty of time, there is no issue checking in, tagging our bags, or dropping them off. Likewise there is no issue at Clear. It took just a few minutes to establish our identities and finish up the registration process. Then it was off to security. And, again, breeze through. Now we find ourselves at the airport with a little more than and hour and a half before boarding begins.

We share an order CinnamonBun. Get some water and trashy magazines and sit by the gate and wait. We board on time and are off on schedule. We landed on time in Houston and then walked from Terminal B to Terminal C. Thankfully we didn’t have to go outside security and then back thought. It wouldn’t have been an issue just an annoyance.

We met Richard and Susan near gate C40 where our plane was taking off from for Santiago. Their plan from San Francisco arrive almost as the same time as ours. We started with a three-hour layover here in Houston. Now there is about two hours before takeoff. We walked around the terminal for a little bit, one because there were few seats in the waiting area, and two because we going to be on the flight to Santiago for a little more than nine hours.

It is an overnight flight, leaving at 20:50 and arriving the next morning in Santiago at 08:45. Now that sounds like twelve hours but there is a three-hour time change involved. We board and get situated when they announce there are some small mechanical issues that need to be dealt with before we can takeoff. We actually start the flight by taking off about an hour late.

They start by serving dinner. The food wasn’t bad, it is just eating this late will make sleeping difficult. We did manage to get a few hours of sleep before landing in Santiago, but that is another day.

Buonanotte e ciao,

Enrico e Maria