Tonight, at the stroke of midnight (1), our flight takes off to take us to begin our next adventure. We’re off to Peru, where we will travel using planes, trains, boats, busses and automobiles across much of the country.
As we are making 7 or 8 stops along the way, our plan was to go with only carry-on baggage. As always, the advantages are: no risk of having your baggage lost, and no waiting at the baggage claim carousel after each flight.
This has worked successfully for our last two trips, but we couldn’t figure it out this time for a couple of reasons. First, because of the length of the trip, our need for liquids exceeds the universal carry-on limitation. And we can’t just buy the supplies at our first stop in Lima, because we have four more domestic flights in Peru, and didn’t think a good plan was to attempt to re-buy the stuff every few days (2). Second, the combination of the length of the trip and the varied climates we will experience just requires too many clothing items. So, rather than fight the inevitable, we are taking one additional carry-on sized bag (3), which we will check for the flights. We’ll drag our cabin luggage with us, so we’re only at risk of loosing the one checked bag and not all of our stuff.
Our last several airport trips have been without incident. We broke that string tonight. First, we got caught by an open drawbridge and sat still for about 10 minutes. We breezed through the bag drop, and then found that TSA-Precheck lines are not open tonight. No reason given (4). So rather than spending five minutes going through security, it took about 25 minutes. Fortunately, we’re always overly cautious about leaving enough time at the airport, and we got to the lounge with an hour remaining before we need to head to the gate. Which is an hour before the scheduled departure.
(1) Not exactly midnight: the flight is scheduled for 11:59. As if any flight actually leaves with that sort of precision.
(2) Some of our liquids are almost certainly not available in Peru.
(3) This bag is actually smaller than the standard 21.5” carry-on bag.
(4) But we can all guess the reason.
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