The flight home. Santiago

Our guide picked us up on time and off we went to the airport. A dream run on the freeway and straight to the check in counter. The friendly smiling check in chick, handed Bob our boarding passes. She noticed that despite requesting our seats some four months ago we were given one seat in the middle of four row 21 and the other in the middle of four, row 15. We asked for two together and the check in chick replied, its a full plane, no can do. We said how can this be, we are one of the first people to check in. She shrugged, embarrassed because she probably hoped we would not have noticed the seating until we were gone, at which point we asked to see the supervisor, who said to ask at the gate when boarding. Its called duck shoving, and nobody wanted to know. Finally a young lady at the gate actually did something and managed to get us two seats together but in the middle of four. Although we had to climb over people to get out we were at least together for the  12 and a half hour flight to Auckland. As it turned out it was a reasonable flight and passed relatively quickly for 50% of us. But wait theres more.