ODO: 338,426
IT’S FINALLY HERE!!! TIME TO GO HOME!!! After having to reschedule our flight three times, we finally get to board a plane back to our real life. So much relief! And a little extra bonus fun this travel day: We signed up for a United Club Card, which gets us United lounge access. This is a new travel experience, and since we don’t know when we will fly next, we plan to visit the lounge in every airport on our way back. First lounge: SFO, waiting for our red eye to Houston. There are three different mini buffets with soups, charcuteries, desserts, pasta, salads. The bar is also free. The chairs are large and comfy with outlets everywhere, and it’s quiet. Solid start.
Second lounge: Houston! We slept the entire five hour flight. The Houston lounge is serving a continental breakfast buffet. Our timing is great, shortly after we settle in a wave of people arrive, enough to make the lounge standing room only. We don’t stay for our entire layover, we need to get our final tastes of America before we board the plane. This means some snacks from the market and some bagel sandwiches. Bagel, and breakfast sandwiches are very difficult to find in South America.
After another uneventful flight, we arrive in Panama City. This layover is only long enough to grab some food and hustle to our final gate. One final uneventful flight, and we are heading to Chilean customs. Finally!! While in America, we purchased an insta pot, and lots of fancy mustards, which means we (fingers crossed!!) have luggage to collect from baggage claim. And we do! This entire flight back has been a dream, either because we are so excited to be back, or because we are now fancy lounge people, it doesn’t matter. Our taxi back to the campground is also uneventful, unlike our Uber from the campground to the airport. We (Berne) spends ten minutes turning the power back on, and then we sleep the best we have slept in three weeks.
Ooooo do we sleep! We are very much appreciating past KoKo and Berne for putting so much effort into this amazingly comfortable cloud of perfection we wake up in. So appreciative we sleep really late. In our defense we are now on the wrong side of a three hour time change, so it looks worse than it actually is. We very slowly go about the work of unpacking, and getting the camper and truck functioning again. Our plan is to grab some groceries on the way to meet friends at a campground outside of town, but today is a holiday. And we find that out by driving to several closed stores through zero traffic at rush hour….With no fresh food available, we get some gas station salads to augment our stores of boxed food.
Another night of fantastic sleep! Camp is up in the hills outside town, very quiet with views of the mountains. This is the perfect place to recover from our long flight, and ease back into camper life. Today is all about being lazy and taking naps, and maybe a little work in between. Our friend Jason is kind enough to make us spaghetti squash for dinner. We are told the holiday goes through the weekend, so we will need to make due, and accept any and all charity until Monday.
Have we mentioned how comfortable our bed is? No? It’s the best. Now that we’ve gotten some rest, chores! We also get the sewing machine out. Before we left, we got it in our heads that we wanted yet another camera (seriously, how many do we need?!). This one is a real photography camera, so of course we had to buy some lenses while we were in the US. And because we bought new toys, KoKo gets to sew a new bag! The up and downside of being able to create your own stuff.
Later in the day we collect some wood and build a fire. Our first campfire in WAY too long. It does double duty, keeps us warm while we wait for our Belgian friends to bring back dinner ingredients, and gets the coals ready for meat and veggie grilling. There are cows in the area, and during dinner, several crash down the retaining wall and turn on one of the water spigots for a drink. Initially we thought they broke the spigot, but this clearly was not the first time they had done this.
More relaxing, and more projects. Today is for replacing the door seal. We do this once a year when the level of dust incursion from driving starts to make KoKo crazy. Berne and Jason take the truck into town for groceries (finally! Snacks!). It’s a weird feeling when your house leaves you for a couple of hours…When they get back Jason makes a spread of salmon and roast cauliflower for dinner.
The adventure of the day is a hike up to the Cruz Mirador. This is a very tentative venture, its hard to know if there will be dogs (it’s a good assumption that there will be), and if/when there are, if they will be nice or scary. KoKo usually doesn’t take this chance, but several other people have done this hike with no issues, so why not? The way up is very uneventful, thank goodness, minus the slight mis-reading of the map that ended at the wrong set of radio towers. A quick ridge walk connected to the actual view point 300 feet above the city. Santiago has notoriously bad air quality, and gets socked in by smog by mid-morning, so the view is mediocre. The walk back is a little more eventful. The last house before the campground has several dogs, a couple of which are very aggressive and serious about their protection jobs. Luckily someone is home to call them back.
Tonight is the maiden voyage for our new InstaPot. We bought a really odd variety of things while we were in the USA. This one is to help us eat more protein. Our intake has been really low because meat is poorly wrapped a lot of times, and cleaning out the bottom of the fridge is a big task. Also, we get to camp late a lot, so cooking is low on the to do list by that point. First meal: beef stew, and it’s a wild success! Super tender slow cooker meat in less than an hour! Excitement is high.
The weather this morning is much cooler than past days. Which makes sense, it is fall here, heading quickly into winter. There is fresh snow in the hills above us. Over the past week there have been several earthquakes in Chile. The farthest, all the way south, off the coast of Ushuaia. The closest, a couple hundred miles from where we’re camped. Our Belgian friends claimed to have felt some of the shaking during the night!
Berne is the campground mechanic, per usual, so he gets recruited to fix some U-joints. Not ours. They are in a bad way, really, really stuck. All the men in the campground end up lending a hand, all three of them, sometimes all at the same time. With some improvised and homemade tools, and lots and lots of hammering, the group manages to get everything apart, cleaned up, and put back together. We end the day with sausages grilled on the fire.
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