I woke up in the air over Mexico City. It was weird to think about; yesterday I woke up in Buenos Aires, today I woke up in Mexico City and tomorrow I’ll wake up in my parents house in Arvada. I’d spent so much time connecting through the Mexico City airport in the past six months that it’d begun to feel like my second home. That was comforting in a way. …until I boarded my flight to Denver. This really started to weigh on me because these was something oddly symbolic about this flight…

It’s a short flight from Mexico City to Denver, under four hours. As we were landing I was listening to Home We’ll Go and it just so happened that it ended right as our wheels touched the ground.

A year ago I downloaded a really cool travel tracker called PolarSteps and turned it on. It tracks all your movements and any time I land in a new city the first thing I do is open it up and tell it to record that as a new step. I opened it while we were taxing to the jet-way and added Denver. Then I did something I’d forgotten I’d ever have to do. One year, 21 countries, 89 steps and over 90,000 miles later I tapped “Finish Trip.”

I finally lost it.

This is it. I woke up early because I had to be out of my place, gathered my luggage and took it over to the lobby of one of our other apartments where we could leave it for the day. My flight wasn’t until much later that night so I was basically homeless in Buenos Aires all day. I walked over to Möoi where a bunch of us were having a final brunch. At about this point a sense of total panic started to settle on me. Anytime anyone would stand up everyone would kind of jump up “Are you leaving!? Is this it!? Is this goodbye!?”

We lost a few after brunch and those of us who were still hanging out went at just sat in Parque de las Ciencias to while away some time. Some folks were over at Sullivan’s so we went there for a while too. I remained in my jumpy state. We lounged around the lobby of this apartment building in the afternoon and slowly lost people one by one. As it happens Matt and Nicole were on my flight to Mexico City so we all left for the airport at about the same time.

It was a late flight and it’d been a hard week. I found myself dozing off in the lounge just completely exhausted from going out all week as well as the emotional toll of this adventure coming to an end and saying good bye to everyone. I started to worry I’d fall asleep and miss my flight so I made myself go stand in line so I wouldn’t doze off. Boarded the flight and promptly went to sleep. Aeromexico business class isn’t much to speak of but being able to lay all the way down on these long overnight flights is a lifesaver.

Another late night meant another unproductive day and we had another party planned for tonight. I managed to drag myself out to lunch at Schwartz & Berg thinking that a giant ruben would help put me in better shape for the coming night. I worked the rest of the day and on my way to the party stopped at Cosi Mi Piace which everyone had been raving about as the best pizza place we’d been to. I thought it was good but the place in Bogota that I can’t remember the name of was better I thought.

Off to our actual final party of the year. Hosted by the guys who hosted one of the first parties of the year. They had rented out this gorgeous AirBNB that was even featured in Argentenian Design magazine or something. It went about like these things go. Lots of drinking and dancing and singing. A pretty standard weeknight by Remote Year standards.

Another late night last night meant that this was another pretty uneventful day. But in the evening I had to rally because time is running out for us. I met Stacey for drinks along with two members of our team who left us in Medellin and had just come back around to Buenos Aires. During this time we were also in the process of doing some “thank you’s” for Jenna and Aline, the two girls who were in charge of us for the whole year. So I headed over to have drinks with them and the rest of the team. Then some of us met back up for dinner at the excellent La Carnicería and, since time is winding down, we all had to go out afterwards and ended up at Sheldon Bar.

Back on my feet after a full day of recovery. I spent the day working from home as usual. Since living together in Mexico, Jamie and I have tried to make it a point to have at least one “date night” each month. Though… I think we’ve missed a few owing to my constant side tripping. Tonight was the last one of our travels and it went in pretty standard Ben and Jamie fashion. We had dinner and drinks at Elena in the Four Seasons and then went to the bar, Pony Line, for after dinner cocktails. I’d been keen to check out this polo themed bar since I arrived and it was cool but also just like the scene at every other Four Seasons bar around the world. After that we began a tour of speakeasys and went to Florería Atlántico which is accessed through a flower shop and then to the one behind Nicky New York Sushi that I’d hit up already. …my memory is a little vague but I’m pretty sure we called it a night after that.

Last night was rough. So rough that I don’t think I managed to get on my feet until around 5pm. Sooo… not much happened today.

Time to depart the desert. We woke up early as it’s a bit of a drive to the airport in Calama and my previous experience made me think that we’d get bogged down in the process of returning the rental car. Rental car procedures being what they are in South America. We made good time and as it happens we were the first flight out that morning so the airport wasn’t even open yet. Nor was our rental car agency. I dropped the keys in the box and just assumed that’d work out alright. We had to stand around outside security for a while waiting for them to open the airport and when they finally did there was a critical shortage of coffee inside.

Flying around Chile is really cool because the Andes, at 20,000 ft, aren’t that far away from the plane even at cruising altitude and as they are constantly covered in perfect white snow it makes for some great views.

I had a quick connection in Santiago to get back to Buenos Aires but Hayden had a good eight or so hours to kill so we took a detour so I could let him into the Pacific Club so he could at least have access to food and alcohol. Left him there and for the first time in a long time we realized the next time we saw each other would be in Colorado.

I walked right onto my plane for the short flight and long drive back to my place in Buenos Aires and then crashed.

Today featured a lot of driving.  We also drove up to 16k ft and across hard packed flats to these crazy salt lagoons which was pretty neat considering we had no clue where we were going. We headed back to the hotel and recouped for a bit before trying for the millionth time to see if our “star tour” was on. It was delayed so we had dinner at Pica del Indio which was alright. Then returned to discover it was in fact on. As I’ve mentioned the skies in the Atacama are gorgeous and we got to use the largest telescope available for public viewing with was a nice superlative to tack on. However, the tour itself was a little rudimentary.

Woke up at not too early an hour, had breakfast and then saddled up for another day of riding. Today took us up on top of a ridge that overlooked the entire valley for a great view. The really cool part, though, was then riding straight down from that ridge across a massive sand dune. We returned to town in the afternoon and I was pretty exhausted. We each worked for a bit and then headed into town for dinner at Ckunna which featured the best steak I’ve had since leaving America. Then we went on a wee pub crawl around San Pedro in a search for live music that, while technically successful, was a bit disappointing in the end. Although we did get to hang out at Los Gor 2 and Mal de Puna so that’s something…

Once again had to work in the morning but then set out on a very cool excursion. We went horseback riding out into the Atacama desert. It was about a five hour ride up through the canyon that follows the one tiny river. We camped next to the river and had dinner there. The Atacama desert is the driest climate on the planet and has almost no light pollution so it’s the best place on the planet to see the stars. Couple that with camping out in the middle of a ravine and it was pretty spectacular. Oh, and freezing.