Thanksgiving Calama-ty

(Andrew) Thanksgiving Day in the airport. We all knew that holidays on the road would be complicated. Yesterday, while Dad was reading our itinerary, we confirmed we will have our Thanksgiving dinner in a hotel, the Altiplanico San Alfonsa, in Santiago. For the first time I am sort of dreading Thanksgiving.

Now our plane to Santiago is delayed for eight hours. We are in Calama, a city in the middle of the Atacama Desert, and are upstairs in the airport cafeteria to have lunch. While eating lunch here we are watching a clip of the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade in “Nueva York” on the TV in the corner that is rapidly spouting Spanish. The showing of the parade ended and the TV turned back on to Spanish shows that I didn’t understand. Lunch today will be Buttcrack (buticrac) Pizza and some hamburgers. Really, its called buticrac pizza and it is covered with spicy meat. Now, better news, after Buttcrack, we are about to board a bus to someplace called Antofagasta to get another plane because our plane from Calama was just cancelled. But then we change plans again and stay to wait another 3 hours for a plane here. This is worse than the pilgrims had it.

Little snip-its of Thanksgiving at home have come back to us; we even had cold-cut turkey for breakfast this morning. But mostly Thanksgiving in Chile is completely different; warm weather instead of cold, unpredictable menu for dinner, sitting in an airport, no relatives for miles and just no warm feeling like the holiday feels at home. There are so many ups and downs about traveling. I miss turkey. A lot.