Puerto Vallarta 2019

2019-02-17 : Depart PV
I was a little worried about how we were going to get to the airport on time for our flight at 7:30. Our AirBnB housekeeper said she thought the busses started running at 6AM, which was not early enough to get us to the airport on time. We met a taxi driver on our street on our first day in town, and I asked him if he'd come at 5AM on the 17th to drive us to the airport. He said he would, but I wasn't comfortable with that being our only plan, so I had some backups worked out. If he didn't show, we could walk down the hill and look for another taxi, hopefully along the main road. I contacted the taxi driver the day before and told him we had to leave at 4:30 (instead of 5:00), to give us some contingency time to find another taxi if necessary. The backup to the backup would be to start walking and hope that an early bus would be able to get us to the airport. Well, Diego the taxi guy showed up... not just at 4:30, but actually at 4:15, so we were at the airport PLENTY early. Better to have the time and not need it, than to need it and not have it...
We weren't sure if we'd have to pay a departure tax when we left the airport. There is conflicting information online about it. The most reliable source we found indicated that, for flights between Mexico and Canada, the tax is included on your airline ticket. I checked our tickets, and there was an item on the invoice that looked like the departure tax. Note for future Rhonda: the departure tax IS included in the airline ticket.
We had flown directly down to Puerto Vallarta from Edmonton, but our return trip included a 3-hour layover in Calgary. Boo. It would have been nice to get home a little early and have some time here to do stuff, but we'd still be home late afternoon. Well, our flight from Calgary was delayed 90 minutes, and then we ended up on the tarmac (including de-icing time) for an hour, so we didn't end up getting back to Edmonton until nearly 8PM.
The Airways parking service ended up being really good - we were very happy with them. We used them for this trip as a "trial run" for using them for a month when we go to France. We're thinking that we may use Jumbo to get our bikes to the airport, and then leave her at Airways. Anyway, they worked out really good. Their luggage compartment in their van is large enough that, if we buy those folding bikes for France we won't even have to pre-drop the bikes at the airport - we should be able to take them right on the shuttle van. Otherwise we do the fancy bicycle pre-drop at the airport. Either way, they're about half price for a month of parking than the other airport parking places.


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