We landed in Lima at about 2 am Chile time, which was about midnight their time. They told us we would be stopping for 40 minutes, but that turned into more like 90 minutes as there was refuelling followed by confusion with seat assignments. Finally we took off, and we were served a snack. It wasn’t a ham and cheese sandwich, but pretty close. The meat could have been pork or turkey. Then we turned off the lights so we could sleep.
When we woke up it was about 5 am Pacific time and the plane was flying up the west coast of Mexico. We filled in the time by watching movies and playing computer games in the little seat-back screen. Before long the sun had risen and we landed in Los Angeles about 7:30 am. We went through immigration and customs, and then collected our backpacks and rechecked them through security. All of the customs and immigration people were unusually polite and friendly today. As there was nothing else to do we went over to the Alaska Airlines terminal and plunked ourselves down at Gate 30 to wait out the two hours before boarding time.
However we didn’t stay plunked down there. We ate a bag of candy as an antidote for too much airline food, and then found our flight’s gate had been changed. The previous flight at Gate 30 was having some unplanned electrical work and had no fixed departure time, so we went over to Gate 32 to continue waiting.
Our flight was a bit late too, but we were finally off the ground at 10:50 am. It was not fully booked so we had an empty seat beside us. Shortly after taking off we both fell asleep. Around noon we were offered a snack of juice and a packet of peanuts. Quite a change from LanChile, but on the other hand we had just about had it with airline food. We flew above thick white clouds almost the whole way, until about Mount Rainier where they broke up and we landed at home in sunshine.
West Coast Hikers Around The World 