JetSmart, Ushuaia & Boarding Seabourn Venture
The trip down to the end of the world started with a 3am wakeup call, a sleepy bus ride to the airport, and a very early morning JetSmart charter flight out of Buenos Aires.
Boarding JetSmart in Buenos Aires
I was an excited, nervous mess, and could barely sit still. I know I tried to read my book, and they fed us some kind of boxed lunch, but I didn’t really pay attention to either. As soon as I spotted snow capped mountains outside the plane I was done for, nose pressed to the window for the rest of the flight staring at Patagonia.
Patagonia from the plane
Once we landed in Ushuaia, we all made our way to baggage claim to wait for our bags. This was my first ever trip with AirTags, and the moment our bags didn’t show up on the carousel I was very happy to have them! They hadn’t been seen, or tracked in about 2 hours, which I took to mean that they were most likely in the air on another flight down to us. The small JetSmart planes are weight restricted, and it’s apparently not uncommon at all for suitcases to be shuffled from one flight to another. Seabourn would be grabbing our bags and bringing them to the ship for us, so it really wasn’t a big deal that they would be arriving on a later flight.
We were given a bus tour around Ushuaia, and then came the moment we had been waiting over two years for - embarking on Seabourn Venture!
Two weeks prior, we’d gotten a phone call from our travel agent with an upgrade offer from Seabourn. Were we interested in a panoramic veranda suite, with floor to ceiling windows? It took us all of 5 minutes to decide, and was the best decision we could have possibly made. That room, those views, the extra space - the in room coffee maker - we made a ton of use of all of it over the next 3 weeks.
Once onboard, we unpacked, headed into town for a quick walk around Ushuaia to see what there was to see, and then back to the ship for dinner.
We were told that the ‘real’ briefings about our journey would all start the following morning. In the meantime,
Before dinner, however, we had the first of what became our regular nightly briefings, where the Captain, Cruise Director and Expedition team would tell us what was to come. As you can see in the picture - there was weather that the Captain did not like in the forecast, so we would be heading out of Ushuaia a little later than expected.
Just a quick dinner in the main dining room (well, as quick as a main dining room dinner could get - an hour and a half or so), then straight to bed for us. The next day would be a long one, full of lots of learning about what was to come, and I could not wait!
