Planning

The company I work for invested in an Electronic Health Record (EHR) about a year ago. Since then I've been putting in 80 -100 hour work weeks. Quite frankly, I'm feeling burned out. So I decided to get away from it all for a few days.
About a week ago, I called my father and asked if he'd be up for a trip. We didn't have any place specific that we wanted to go, so I made several sample itineraries with corresponding budgets and we began to weigh our options.
Dad and I talked about inviting dad's brother, Dennis, along for the trip, so we shared the list of itineraries with him. After a couple of conversations, we ended up agreeing to go to Buenos Aires, Argentina.
I've been there twice before, but not in the last 5 years. Dad and Dennis have never been there. With only 10 days to prepare, my work is cut out for me.

The first step for us was to nail down a flight. I went with trusty Orbitz and found round trip flights for $841 -- not bad for leaving out of Des Moines, especially given less than two weeks' notice. The flight goes from Des Moines to Atlanta, then from Atlanta directly to Buenos Aires. That second flight is a doozy.. 10+ hours long, during the middle of the night.

The good news is that there's only a 2 hour time difference when you get there (BA is two hours ahead of us here in Iowa). This shouldn't cause us any jetlag. Here's the flight route we'll be taking:



Also, I picked seats for our flights in three separate rows that, at the time of booking, each had three empty seats. My hope is that this stays this way so we can have extra room to lie down. We're assigned to seats 33E,34E & 35E. You can monitor this flight's seat assignments (to see if the seats next to us stay open) by going here. I did the same thing for our return flight but for seats 30E, 31E & 32E, you can check this flights seating assignments here.



Having been to Buenos Aires twice before, I knew the value of renting an apartment rather than staying in a hotel. Not only is it more comfortable, it's less expensive. After searching quite a few options, I finally decided to rent an apartment in the downtown Buenos Aires neighborhood of San Telmo . While my previous stays in Buenos Aires were in the neighborhood of Recoleta, I know San Telmo to be a nice place too. You can see a video of the actual apartment in the two videos below. We're getting all of this for about $50 per person per night (that's Motel 6 prices).





For more information on things to do, restaurants and other tips go to this site.