Everything Just Works Out in the End

Feb. 18

Matt had a great time rafting and had some good stories for me when he got back. Nothing quite like his rafting trip in Peru but he still had fun. I made us dinner at the hostal and got my arse chewed for cooking in the kitchen??? Apparently it's only for making snacks. Well, in the end I still made my dinner and we were off to the hot springs.

The hot springs, or "termas" as they are called in Spanish, were about a 40 minute ride away. Our driver drove like a bat out of hell, which has come to be expected. The springs are very nat-u-ral. Big hot tubs with only large stones as chairs dispersed along the side of a very chilly river. Very nice. We arrived at about 8pm and around 9pm it started to get dark. I noticed all the families were leaving so I was sure that all of the perverts would start showing up. Not quite, but the snoggers did. Lots of young couples showing their affection for each other. Luckily there were a couple of well-lit hot tubs where we weren't in the way of these snoggers. We left at 11pm and the place was open all night so who knows what goes on after that!

Feb. 19

Our last day in Pucón. We headed to the grocery store to pick up some snacks and breakfast and then hit the beach. Our plan was to spend most of the day there, shower up, get some dinner and then head to the bus station and our train back to Santiago. We had a good day hanging out on the beach, walking around town and chilling out at a couple of outdoor cafés. At 7pm we headed to the bus station and got the rock out of there. Our train was, of course, late. I'm pretty sure we didn't take any mode of transportation in Chile that did leave on time. The trip up was less confusing (now we knew to expect the break in the track) and we both ended up getting more sleep.

Feb. 20

Rental car! The open road! Freedom! We picked up our rantel car and hit the road. We had no real plans except to explore some towns south of Santiago. The following day was reserved for winery tours and we figured we would wing it for a place to stay that night. We had a great time tooling around checking out a few little towns. We stopped for lunch in a place about 2 hours south of Santiago. Then we navigated back north on the dusty barely two lane mountain roads. It's pretty dry in this area and looks almost desert-y.

Around 5:30 we decided we better find a place to stay. We looked in a small city near Pirque (where the wineries are) first. We looked, and we looked and we drove around and around and we could not find a single hotel, guesthouse, homeless shelter, nothing! So we headed back to tiny Pirque hoping that there would be something there. No luck. At this point it was 7:30 or so and after asking several people about places to stay and getting the "there really aren't any" we made the 40 minute drive back to Santiago. We drove about 15 minutes into the city and randomly came across the Bonaparte Hotel. We were both exhausted at this point (remember we slept in seats on the train the night before) and Matt was done driving (a good lesson on how to make your husband crack) and decided as long as it was less than $100 a night we were in. I went inside to scope the place out and found it to be a very nice hotel with free parking, breakfast included, free internet, a pool, late check-out and all of this for only $70 a night! We were so in. The icing on the cake was that they had a queen-sized bed. By no choice of our own, we had been sleeping in separate, twin beds for the last two weeks due to reservation errors, communication errors and just plain bad luck!

We took a recommendation from the guy at the front desk and had our first good meal in Chile. What a surprise! What had been a rough afternoon became a very nice evening.

Feb. 21

We slept in and awoke to find that there were clouds hiding the sun. So no trip to the pool for me. We're checking out at 2pm and then will head down to Concha y Toro and Santa Rita wineries. Not sure if we'll actually be able to get on a tour but we're hoping to do some tastings and purchasing. We'll drop our car of at 8pm tonight and then hop on our direct flight back to Atlanta at 10:40! What an adventure it has been....