Easter island - day1 travels

We left Augusta around 5pm on Saturday to begin the journey to Easter island. One of the goals of my fellowship was to plan an expedition where I'd be in charge of planning and executing a trip to a new location taking into account medical resources, safety, CDC recommendations, group travel and just about everything else :) I decided on our way to the Atacama desert for Racing the Planet would be a great time to work on this requirement.
I decided to plan a trip for Mike Caudell, my fellowship director and I to go to Easter Island. I'll be sharing more about the planning my experiences from that end afterwards.

From Augusta we flew to Atlanta - had a 3+ hour layover in which we feasted on lots of the foods we'd miss while traveling including some Georgia IPAs and salad. The flight from Atlanta departed around 9:50 PM and we arrived the next morning in Santiago. I think we both slept off and on. Not great sleep, but could be worse. Once in Santiago we paid the repriprocity fee ($160) just to enter the country. We cleared customs without a problem - our luggage all made it too :) We had a couple hours to spare before our next flight but were both exhausted so we napped while small children ran around screaming in spanish at our next gate. LAN airlines does a cool boarding style where they board by sections of rows. It seems to go much faster or perhaps people just bring less stuff. 5 hours later - just about 24 hours after we left Augusta we landed on Easter Island. Surprisingly the time zone there is EST.

We headed into the very small airport, bought park passes, collected our luggage and headed to Hotel Orongo where we were staying.