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Whew! What an adventure! That was freaking cool! How many sentences can I write with and exclamation point!?

Ok, enough of that. We’re back at the farm. Long story short, the kids were great. We all had a good time. If you are reading these words you must visit Cochamó, more specifically the La Junta valley, at least once in your life. It is stunning. We spent two full days there and could have easily spent two weeks.

Berry and I have a ton of pictures and our own stories to tell, but that has to wait for later.

Yup, move along… no pictures here to see. No, honestly no pictures. Go look at awkward family portraits, LOLCats, or something.

Don’t look at me like that. No means no. Yeah, I know it’s mean. You’ll enjoy them when I have time… but… yeah… I gotta get back to work… but… um…

Ok… here.

Bridges are really over rated.

Now go waste your time some where else….

Things are starting to dry up around here. The rain isn’t as prevalent as it has been. The part of the road that leads up to our house is usually a small creek, but now with the drier weather it is a small brook.

Over the next week or so it’s supposed to be really nice and sunny just in time for our Christmas trip. Yeah, we’ve finally rescheduled our Christmas trip and it starts this Friday! We are heading to Cochamó. It is supposed to be simply gorgeous and magical. Bradley and Brandie (aka The Bumble Bees), the WWOOFers who have been at the farm just a few days longer than we have, went to Cochamó a couple of weeks ago and loved it.

We’re going with the outfitters called Campo Aventura. Weather permitting we’ll be going on a boat ride to a sea lion colony and then to a natural hot springs. We’ll also be heading up to La Junta which is a high valley about 8-10km from town. That is where a lot of the beautiful pictures in the above links were taken. All four of us will be going on horses through a temperate rain forests up to this valley. We’ll be staying up there for 3 days and 3 nights to hike, explore, and relax around the valley. To say we are excited about our upcoming mini-adventure would be an understatement.

This is all to say that we will be out of contact from the 22nd until the 29th, so the family and friends who naturally worry about us and our foolish follies won’t think we’ve dropped off the edge of Patagonia. When we get back we’ll have SD cards full of pictures and hopefully more really interesting stories to tell.

I’ll leave you some pictures from the sunset that I was looking forward to see in this post. All of these were taken from the front yard of the Hill House. We’ll be back on line on the 29th until then… Chao.

Nothing big today, I’m just posting a quick glimpse into yesterday morning. I slept in and Berry was very industrious. She cooked a nice big breakfast and the kids and I poked around on the computer and did a little bit of school stuff. All in all a pretty relaxed start to our day.

Wow! What a great day in Puerto Varas. We got up around 6am to get everyone ready to get to the bus stop at the end of the road at 7:20. It started out very overcast and a bit foggy. Mist was rising off the grass and flowers as we walked down the road. It was absolutely beautiful. A couple of buses later we were in Puerto Varas(PV). It was almost 9am and very little was open. Most shops open around 10-ish so we had some time to walk around the center of town.

It’s really easy to get around downtown PV. It’s only about about 10-15 blocks long and wide and Lake Llanquihue is always close. We found the only restaurant that was open, Cafe Dane’s, which is known for their large portions and their empanadas. After a nice big breakfast there, we went down through some tourist shops, through the Plaza de Armas, and then finally down to the water front and what they call a beach. The beach is a bit dirty and brown, but the kids took to it quickly and had a blast. Before we knew it they were soaked and they got down to their underwear and t-shirts.

We ended up staying at the beach for a couple of hours. The clouds that started our day burned off and we soon found our selves on a picture perfect day in Southern Chile. Berry met a girl from Holland via Canada who was heading down to Antarctica. She’s well on her way to visit all seven continents before she’s 30. She just has two more left, Africa and Australia. I ended up renting a canoe and taking both kids out on the lake. It was a blast.

We left the beach then grabbed some fantastic chocolate. We consumed about $6 worth of chocolate in less than a minute. After that we figured out we were all ravenous. We grabbed lunch at a nice place just down from the beach. We met some more people from Holland and Spain. Graham talked with them for quite some time. It was a nice afternoon. We tried a new beer called Kross that we heard good things about from Bradley. Their Mai Bock is absolutely fantastic.

By the time we finished lunch it was almost time to leave to catch our bus back to the campo. We walked quickly through some more markets and stopped by Cafe Dane’s again to grab apple strudel and empanadas for breakfast and dinner the next day (the apple strudel was delectable by the way). We grabbed the bus back to Puerto Montt. After a little bit of a wait we caught the bus back to campo, the Calbuco Por Costa. It was a Friday afternoon and the last bus that goes through the campo so it was jam packed with families, grandparents, workers, and gringos (the Bumble Bees and us).

It was such a great fun day for our family and we plan to make more trips around PV and the surrounding lakes. Berry and I are planning to try to climb Volcano Osorno later this summer. When we go we’ll definitely let you know about our adventures.

Chao!

UPDATE: Here is Berry’s version of the day.

Although the country side is beautiful, I find that my eyes always are drawn to the sky. We are about an hour from the mountains so there is plenty of open space to see the everything above. That is when it’s not raining. The picture to the left does not do any justice to what I actually experienced walking across the campo a few days ago. It was fantastic with the wind whipping around as the clouds were racing through the sky. Another front was coming and we would get a huge down pour that night.

We had a late night last night so we decided not to head to Puerto Varas today. We will go in tomorrow. We slept in and were greeted with an absolutely gorgeous day. We even saw the elusive Volcano Yates which is much more shy and rarely seen than Osorno and Calbuco. If the sky holds we will have some stunning pictures to come from the sunset this evening.

Below are a series from last night as the last batch of rain left. Again pictures just do not even come close to the magic that was on display.

So for my first four day weekend (i.e. not working on a computer), my project was to make us a nice kitchen table and benches. We had only one little plastic table and if you glanced it with a foot or knee your drink or food would end up all over the table. It was quite frustrating. Berry was very adamant about getting a table up there as soon as possible.

I wanted something sturdy that would last for a long time. I sketched out a few ideas and started in promptly at the crack of noon last Thursday. They had a drill and some screws and I figured I would bust it out in a day or two. Well, that did not happen. The screws they had were flat head screws and if you use the drill you end up with nice gouges in your wood (which our table has a few).

Luckily Lisa made a trip to Sodimac (think Home Depot or Lowes) and brought back some 3 inch phillips head screws just in time for me to work on the legs of the table. I quickly found out that the drill has only one speed. Fast, super fast. It stripped the head of the screw in less than five seconds, even when I pre-drilled the hole. I looked around for regular screw drivers. None to be found. Tools have a tendency to get misplaced around the campo. For the legs I screwed in the 3 inch screws by hand with my Leatherman that I got for Christmas. I finished the table after a long day, but it was done and we drove it up to the hill house. My forearms were aching. At the end of the day, I was missing my DeWalt 18 Volt Multi Speed Drill more than a tall MaiBock at The Terminal.

The next day we get up and visit some of the neighbors around the farm. It’s a nice little walk in the rain and we get to see where some people that we’ve met live. After lunch I start on the benches and looked a little bit harder for any screwdrivers. No luck. I get about half way done before it’s time for dinner. I leave it with just the legs and support to do the next day. After a few hours of twisting the screws in and a little bit of compromising on my table/bench plans, we had two great sturdy benches.

Below are a few more pictures of la mesa.

One thing that jumped out of us when we got here, even driving in at 1am from Santiago, was foxglove was absolutely every where. Berry literally squealed as we were weaving through the bumpy country roads and saw the flowers when the headlights shined on them.

Here are some shots that Berry took while she stole borrowed my camera for a day.

I hope everyone is safe, happy, and trying to stay warm. Chao!

We had a great Chilean Meal for New Year’s Eve, roasted sheep over an open pit. We got a late start on so we didn’t eat until well after 10pm. The kids were wiped out and the adults got to stay up till midnight. That’s the first time I’d seen midnight on New Year’s in a couple of years.

It was raining a bit so we cooked the sheep in the shed.

The fire is getting closer.

The sheep is ready to cook.

Finger Lickin' Good, ya'll

*cough*cough* Smile! *cough*cough*

Bradley (one half of the Bumble Bees) channels his inner Fred Flintstone.

A great shot of Scott and Lisa

Berry with her sweet sleeping baby boy.

We had a really good time, cooking, eating, and talking all evening long. Not a bad way to ring in the New Year.

Taken on my commute to work this morning.

You have a different perspective living in rural farmland 45 minutes outside of Puerto Montt. Splitting fire wood for a fire in the evening with friends and family  is different from splitting wood because you cook all your food on a wood stove. Running water is not a given even in such a wet and rainy place Ilque is. Our water comes from mainly cisterns or an old well at the back of the property. Our picky eaters know realize that if they don’t eat what they are served, they get nothing else. Dry shoes and feet are very important, but some how very difficult to achieve.

This morning I woke up early to start to fire for tea, breakfast, and to knock off the chill of the morning. Once the flames started going good enough, I went to brush my teeth. No water. I checked the kitchen sink. No water. Awww, crap! I put on my boots climbed up to our cistern which supplies the house. Bone dry. There was an absolute monsoon last night while we slept so there could only be one thing. A leak. No time to fix it so I turned on the well which is the back up when the weather dries up later in the summer. I now know one of the projects I’ll be doing on my next day off. That is if Berry doesn’t get to it first.

The morning bright, warm, and sunny, but now rain has moved in. It looks like it will be a bit like that for the next few days. The farm house is quite. Berry and the kids are back at the Hill House and the McLean’s are out visiting neighbors. I’m able to knock out a good bit of work and poke a way at this blog.

I’ve got a couple of more photos that don’t really belong anywhere right now… so here we go.

Our breakfast table this morning.

Yerba Mate - Tea of the Gods! It's like main lining caffeine with a cool straw.

Bacon. The family pig. It is the quintessential pig.

To find out how they got Bacon The Pig you can go here.

Every morning when we walk across the campo to get to the farm house, it’s like a mini adventure. You walk through fields of knee high grass, dandelions, and scrub bushes, through marshy wet lands, over small creeks on old faded boards, and finally through the gates to the farm house where our host family and the internet connection lives.  Mmmmm, sweet tasty internet.

The past few days have been absolutely gorgeous. Saturday we mainly hung out at our house on the hill and had all the children with us. Sunday I mainly worked inside on various projects on line. I worked mainly from the main dinning table for most of the day. It’s the main source of all activity and noise on the farm. Needless to say it didn’t help with concentrating or sinking deep into thought on some things that I needed to get done.

After I was finished with my on line work, I decided to make a small little office desk to go upstairs where I could be a little bit more out of the way. I took some scrap pieces of wood from the bodaga and fashioned myself a nice, light, little desk. You can see it in the picture above. That is my new work area. It has a nice view out to the eucalyptus trees and a small field. Right now I have the window opened and a fresh breeze is coming through.

Hopefully I’ll be able to go out and play some this afternoon or this evening. We’re so far south the sun doesn’t set until 10 pm. It’s really been tough to get accustomed to it. Off to go get some work done.