Good Job, Mom (Not! Thank Goodness for Dad!)

We've been looking forward to today since the day we arrived in Chile.  We went up into the mountains.

The mountains of Chile are spectacular.  The Andes are the longest mountain range in the world, running more than 4,000 miles from the northern part of South America in Venezuela all the way south through Chile.  While Santiago looks much like Denver in terms of being a city in the valley at the foot of the mountains, the Andes rise much more abruptly than the Rockies do outside of Denver.  The ski season is in full swing here because it's winter, but is only about 3 months long compared to almost 6 months in Colorado.

We went to Farellones today, ironically at the base of Cerro Colorado!  This is the closest ski area to Santiago and you can see a picture of it to the right.  The road that goes up into the mountains from Santiago is a lot different from I-70!  It is at best a 1 1/2 lane road that has two lane traffic on it.  For two cars to get by, one car has to stop and the other has to go by very slowly.

There are 40 switchbacks to get up to Farellones and Cerro Colorado.  And they are tight and steep!  The police require that every vehicle that goes up have chains, because when it snows it is almost impossible to get up these steep switchbacks.  We saw a small fuel truck that got stuck and was waiting for a toe truck to pull it out of the middle of the switchback.  We also saw a car that went over the side of the road and fell about 30 feet down.  We couldn't tell, but it seemed like the people were ok (it happened a bit of time before we got there).

When we got up to Cerro Colorado we discovered that it had mostly green runs, and a few blues and reds (we're not sure what red is) - maybe 2-3 blacks.  The peak was just below 11,000 feet.  We thought about renting skis, but we just didn't have the right gear with us to ski.

We had told the driver of our van (which was cheaper than the 6 of us taking the bus up actually), who spoke mostly Spanish, that we wanted to leave at about 2:00 p.m.  When 2:00 p.m. came and we were finishing up some ice cream (it was a hot day today, probably 50 F or more), I thought it would be polite to tell the driver it would just be 5-10 more minutes before we were ready to go back to Santiago.  The kids were done, and we had a great time, so as you know that's a good time to leave.  The driver said all kinds of words in Spanish that I didn't understand, but he was so nice I just smiled and said "si" (yes).  We could see the driver and van from where we were sitting and eating ice cream, and we noticed that he locked the van up and started walking back up to the mountain.  We were puzzled by this because we thought we would be leaving in 5-10 min.  As he walked by us I put five fingers up and said, "Cinco minutes (5 minutes)," and he smiled and said something I again didn't understand.

Greg said, "Honey, I think he's saying he'll be back at 4:30 p.m. to pick us up.  He thought you wanted to leave at 5:10 p.m., not in 5-10 minutes, and he said 4:30 p.m. would be much better."  Eeek!  The kids would not last for another 90 min.  So of course I did what any wife would do.  Me:  "Honey, do something!  Go tell him we're ready to leave."  So, thank goodness for Dad or we would have been at Cerro Colorado for much longer than the kids could have handled.

One of the things that surprised us the most about our trip up into the mountains was how many cactus are in the mountains.  The picture to the right here shows what many of them look like.  These went up to what we would guess was at least 7,000-8,000 feet in elevation.

Tomorrow Greg and the boys go to Casa Esperanza to work on the guest house and love on the girls.  In the meantime, Griff and Noah wanted to show you the progress they are making on crossing their eyes.