If you want to get to Antarctica the most common way is to get yourself to Ushuaia, Argentina. There are a number of ways to do that. If you are frugal like Jenni and I that involves several flights.
January 4th, 2023 my mom dropped Jenni and I off at the Windsor, ON, Canada airport. Yes we cross an international border to catch flights all the time. It tends to be cheaper. I will give you a whole post on that some day. The plan when she dropped us off was to fly to Toronto and then on to Santiago, Chile and then to Buenos Aires and land a full day in advance of the charter flight to Ushuaia. It didn’t go to plan but it didn’t go as bad as it could have.
The flight from Windsor to Toronto is always stressful. It is not a full size plane so everything in smaller, including the overhead bins for your luggage. Jenni and I have backpacks that we use as carryons and then each have a personal item bag. This time we also checked a bag. The checked bag making it to its final destination is always a concern. For this trip we bought apple airtags to track those checked bags. Highly recommend. However, that is never my biggest concern flying out of Windsor. My biggest concern is always am I going to be able to fit my carryon in the overhead compartment. If you are flying with a carryon sized roll aboard that answer is yes. If you are flying with what is almost always an over stuffed backpack that answer is probably no.
They used to have you put your carryons on a cart that they checked and then gave them back to you when you landed. That doesn’t appear to be the case any longer. You will have to make them fit or hope the flight attendants are nice. Ours did not fit but we got lucky that there were empty seats and the flight attendants were nice. Jenni was able to get her carryon under the seat of an empty seat and the flight attendants took mine and shoved as far under another empty seat as they could. Crisis avoided.
The next hurdle came when we sat on the tarmac in Toronto for roughly and hour and half. We only had around 80 minutes to make our connection when we landed in Chile. So there we sat on the plane on the tarmac in Toronto watching our window to connect disappear. We knew we were missing our connection before we took off but there was nothing we could do about it. We landed in Chile to watch our flight from Santiago to Buenos Aires back out as we we getting off the plane from Toronto. This was our worst nightmare. Now what? How do we get to Buenos Aires TODAY so that we do not miss our charter flight. We found an information desk, they sent us back to the gate to see if a gate agent was still there. No luck so back to information. Information ended up finding someone that we could talk to and they let us know that we had already been rebooked on a later flight to Buenos Aires.
Being rebooked was great news. I just wish Air Canada had communicated this to us. They had been sending emails and texts with other flight delays and changes but not this one. The lack of communication is what left us wandering the airport in Chile, hoping we could figure out how to get on another flight to Buenos Aires. Once we got the information about the new flight all of our stress was alleviated. We knew we were getting to Buenos Aires in time to make our flight to Ushuaia. That was the biggest hurdle. We would have just less than 24 hours in Buenos Aires.