Chee-Lay!

Chile
April 13-17

After the boat docked in Valparaiso, Chile and we took one last run at the all you can eat breakfast buffet with the oldies, we reluctantly stepped off our floating meal ticket. While on the ship we ended up hanging out with this guy John, who was on the cruise with his Mom. John is a retired cop from Arizona and had just moved down to Chile for his wife's job. They've only been living there since January and he's still working on learning his Spanish, so between not being able to communicate with anyone in the country and only having the walking dead (too far?) to chat with on the ship he really liked hanging out with us and we really liked hanging out with him too! We had a lot of fun with him and his mom playing all kinds of card games and McKay and John played a a wicked game of Ping Pong! John was so incredibly nice and ended up inviting us to stay at his house while we were in Santiago. So, when we got off the ship John's wife was waiting with a truck she had borrowed from a coworker to haul all of us and our luggage home!

First we zipped through town! Valparaiso is supposedly the biggest port in South America and it is a really cute little town. Even though it's right on the coast it's still in the mountains and the streets and houses are all built on crazy hills. Luckily we had John's mom as an excuse to not hike our way up and down the streets and just ended up touring it in the truck with McKay making up the history as we went.

We ended up spending the next 3 days hanging out with them in their amazing right on the golf course condo with sweet real big high def TV's, we were in heaven! They were so amazingly sweet and took the best care of us, they fed us and showed us around gave us the royal treatment and it was so nice to be taken care of for a few days. Not to mention the fact that Chile is way more expensive than even the US, so they saved us a lot of money! It was really sad to say goodbye but before we could go we made them promise to come visit us in Utah someday so we can try to return the favor. :)

Valparaiso swap meet! All those clothes you sent to the DI are now being recirculated through Chile! Unfortunately this is the only picture we took there, so you'll just have to use this pic, my vastly detailed description and your imagination to to piece the rest of it together.... :)

On our way back to Santiago we stopped at Vina Indomita. Chile is really known for its wine and they have vineyards all over so it was fun to stop and check one of them out.

 Lookin out over the vineyard!

 This is John and his mom Twila in the elevator at their condo, yep there's an elevator at their condo!

Do you wish you had this view of an awesome golf course outside your living room? Me too!

John let us take his golf cart for a spin around the course, we were shouting out pointers (for free I might add) to everyone we passed along the way, but for some reason no one seemed to appreciate it... Weird right? :)

Wouldn't that be a rough view to wake up to? :)

Out to lunch! Don't worry it was only $110 for the 4 of us to eat, no appetizers, no desserts... Ouch! Chile was ridiculously pricey!

Taadaa! It's Jaime!! I love Jaime so much, we played soccer together back in the day and she visited us last summer in ATL on a road trip! She just moved down to Santiago for work a couple months earlier and it was so great to see her! She made us a delicious lunch at her new apartment and then gave us a tour around the city!

Huesillos, the official drink of Chile, it means little bones! It's made of barley on the bottom and is topped off with peaches and lots of canned peach juice and it didn't even taste like bones! :)

This is the view from one of the two big main hills that people climb up to check out the city from. Luckily we found a free elevator that helped us cheat and took us halfway up the mountain or I probably wouldn't have made it!

I don't know why this was such a revelation to me, but this is an outdoor roller rink, how awesome is that?! Right? Right?

This is Stacey, she dropped us off at the metro on her way to work so we didn't have to take a $50 taxi! We love her and we were so sad to say goodbye!