The bulk of the trip turned out to be a breeze. A quick flight from Denver to Toronto. Just enough time in Toronto to get some dinner and a couple of drinks to start to feel groggy and then take off at 11:45pm en route to Santiago. Getting from Santiago to our current location in Valparaiso turned out to be a bit of an episode from Vacation. We rented this sweet family roadster...
Kerri proved to be the most adept stick shift driver in the family by navigating roads, traffic and hills with little to no help from the navigator. After an unplanned tour of Valparaiso we finally stumbled upon our accomodations for the next three nights. A nice little hostel, apparently conveniently located, right in the heart of Valpo on Cerro Carcel (or Jail Hill for you Spanish-challenged). We got freshened up and took a walk to see some of the town and find food. Valparaiso is a town composed of many hills...this place makes San Francisco look like the Great Salt Flat. So in order to quickly navigate these hills by foot there are this lifts. They don't exactly inspire massive confidence in engineering from the look and age of them but we rode one anyway because I'm hungry!!
After some drinks and tapas up on Cerro Allegre we found a great spot for dinner with a view. Its pretty hard to believe that one day you can wake up in your bed in Colorado and the next day you can be sitting on the other side of the world having dinner here.
At this point the exhaustion was so much that the walk back home was only possible because of the prospect of sleep. We had been up for about 36 hours with only 4 hours or so of sleep...
Cheers,
Billy and Kerri
P.S. - Apparently a lot of American Pop Music is covered by some one from within the country/region...but its still in English...its an odd phenomenon as I sit here in our hostel listening to some one playing a Backstreet Boys (or N'Sync not sure) song but the lyrics are in English with a latin accent. We heard this type of thing every where we went yesterday...
