Earlier this week, I ended my travels for 2008 and returned to South Florida.

When I first planned the trip, I left it open-ended on purpose. From the beginning of my 2007 trip, I had felt pressed for time. I didn’t want that to happen again. This year I felt free to do whatever I wanted for as long as I wanted, and I think that added to my enjoyment.

There wasn’t a single reason that I decided during the last week in November that it was about time to wrap things up. After Machu Picchu, I felt that I had accomplished what I wanted to accomplish. After my long bus trip to Santiago de Chile (and more than 2500 miles on various buses over nine weeks), I wasn’t looking forward to any more land travel. As much as I enjoyed all of the interesting food I consumed in Ecuador and Peru, I could feel the damage that had been done to my digestive processes. And certain events at home made me anxious about what I would find when I returned.

I had been watching airfares during the week between Christmas and New Year’s, targeting that week for my return. One morning last week, the reasonable fares I had been seeing disappeared, which forced me to expand my search. Once price became a factor, it was clear that the earlier in December I came back, the better.

My return half of my round-trip ticket on American was from Quito. Originally I had thought I would retrace my steps from the south to the Equator and fly back from there. I researched one-way tickets from Chile to Ecuador and found that they were more expensive than one-way tickets from Chile to Florida. So I jumped for a two-stop itinerary through Lima and Costa Rica on TACA, which on December 1 cost about one-half the round-trip cost between Santiago and Miami.

My flight from Santiago through Lima to San Jose, Costa Rica was routine and on-time. I was scheduled for a five-plus hour layover in San Jose, which seemed like an ordeal. Once it was over, I would be just three hours from Miami.

The weather in San Jose was good shortly after noon when I arrived, but clouds and rain moved in over the course of the next few hours. By four it was getting a little foggy, but the rain was intermittent, and I didn’t think much of it. Planes taking off disappeared in the mist just a few feet off the ground, but they were still taking off. By five, it was clear that no planes were taking off or landing.

Very little official information was available in the airport about what was going on, but in the waiting rooms, we shared what we were able to glean. Apparently several planes had been diverted to Nicaragua and El Salvador, and others weren’t going to depart from their distant originating cities until the airport was open again.

At nine in the evening, the airport opened again. American announced that its incoming plane wasn’t going to arrive until the morning, so its flight to Florida would be departing at 9:45 in the morning. Passengers were free to stay in the airport overnight as American would do nothing for them except provide a snack. My airline, TACA, said that it was going to try to get its diverted flights to San Jose in the next few hours. Decisions about departing flights would be made depending on the number that actually arrived.

San Jose is a TACA hub, so most of the passengers who would be taking my Miami flight were scheduled to arrive on the six or eight diverted flights. About an hour later, TACA flights started arriving, and gates were allocated to its outgoing flights. The possibility that I would actually make it to Miami started looking real when a gate was announced for that flight.

A couple of hours passed while we waited in the gate area for a plane to arrive. At about 11 p.m. Miami time, an announcement was made that directed us to another gate, but there was no plane there either. An hour or so later, an airplane did appear at our gate, and we boarded shortly thereafter. A little over three hours later, we were in Miami.

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