December 13th, 2018
We left Camper Travel north of Santiago for the airport at 5:30 pm after a small Uber fiasco and our flight to Buffalo via Atlanta was smooth and pretty much on time and no luggage was lost.
We arrived at 10:30 am on the 14th and took another Uber to where our car is stored, spent nearly 90 minutes sorting through the online shopping we’d done (including truck parts) and had shipped to the place that stores our Honda, set up our new Google Fi phones (our Christmas presents to each other), returned Fran’s defective Fit Bit (that she’d bought on our last trip home and it died shortly after returning to Peru!) and made our way to the Toronto airport to pick up Serena. Traffic was horrific enroute near Hamilton and we were almost an hour late! Then to top it off, poor Serena was not feeling well. Instead of going straight to Josh’s place, we checked into our hotel near his place, left Serena there to sleep and went to Josh’s for a quick visit and dinner before the grand kids had to go to bed. They were SO excited.
We spent Saturday and Sunday all together as a family, doing some early Christmas stuff (first time in a long time that all four of us had been able to do Christmas together) and it was quick but fun.
Our girl:
an older one with her “beau”. Kurt:
Early Christmas Eve:
We left after dinner on Sunday night to head towards the border for the night as Doug had a flight to Seattle out of Buffalo to go see his mom for a few days and Fran was heading east driving to Kingston to see her mom. Both the trips were quick and mostly painless…..and we reunited on Thursday night at the Buffalo airport to return to a different hotel near Joshua’s place. Serena stayed with Josh for two more days before returning home on Tuesday.
So Friday, the five of us made our way to the mall to see Santa and the rest of that day, Saturday and Sunday we opened more gifts, played, went swimming at our hotel and generally just enjoyed the family time.
colouring time:
lots of bedtime stories:
The kids returned to their Mom’s on Sunday night and we had dinner and a movie with Josh at our hotel. He flew to Mexico City next the morning for a week’s holiday and we left and made our way back to Buffalo to run a few errands, repack (stuffing 100 pounds of sh*t into 80 pound bags!) and returned our car to storage before spending the night at an airport hotel. We returned to Santiago on flights beginning on Dec 25th and landing on Dec 26th. This time we had two layovers so it seemed to take a long time.
Turned out Fran’s new Fit Bit did arrive but there was no watch straps or charger with it?!!! No one told her when she returned the defective one that she should only return the watch itself so after a chat online, she was told they would ship it Chile if we gave them an address and apologized for the “miscommunication”. Annoying but solvable with patience.
As many of you know, we don’t post photos of the grand kids online so if you want to see some, let me know; there are a few of you whom I will of course send a few too automatically.
Happy new year!
