Going Home, Day 15

Dave and I did manage to get up for a final walk to the falls before the hoi polloi were allowed in the park. It was an ideal way to wake up, but we did not get the orgy of rainbows our friends experienced the day before (we went about a half hour earlier and maybe that was just enough to change the angle of the sun).

We enjoyed a leisurely brunch by the pool only briefly interrupted by the coatamundi that leapt up onto our table. Dave performed the classic back-of-the-hand-shove-with-obscenities familiar to people who live with cats, earning a wave of startled admiration from the other guests. And then it was time to head to the airport.

There were so many amazingly, fantastically wonderful things about this trip. Departing from the Foz do Iguacu airport on a Saturday afternoon was emphatically not one of them. It’s a small airport -- just a hall of souvenir shops about the size of a large high school gym, divided by a hallway leading to a handful of check in kiosks and three service desks, then a rope line to a single security check and then a small waiting area with one doorway out to the tarmac where you walk to your plane. You could walk in the front door, through the hall, past the check in and security gates and out to the tarmac in less than 60 seconds. It took us 90 minutes.

HUNDREDS of people were lined up in a chaotic spiral when we walked in. Periodically, a harassed looking young person in a vaguely official looking shirt with a badge would walk into the scrum and shout a flight number in Portguguese and an even more harassed looking group of a dozen people would leave the scrum to try and follow the young person through the writhing mass of increasingly cranky humanity in an attempt to get on a plane. Eventually it was our flight number being called -- this jumped us past maybe 200 people, but only as far as the check in kiosks, where we spent another aggravating 15 minutes dealing with getting boarding passes and dropping off luggage. Then it was time to get into the security line which was, for all intents and purposes, not moving AT ALL. Eventually another badged young person hollered for our flight and we jumped the security line, too. We lunged for restrooms and then hurled ourselves out the door and sprinted across the tarmac.

But we made it to Rio, killed two hours of our five hour layover drinking at the TGI Fridays in the airport (they make a shockingly good caipirinha) and then said gradual goodbyes to each other as we boarded our flights to DC (or in Andy’s case, Salt Lake City, which seemed actively cruel). Obrigado, Brazil.