Dec. 22nd - On to Bariloche!

As a brief customer service announcement for those of you that might be slightly less computer savvy, you can click on any of the pictures you see in this blog to pull up a full-size version.

Also, we forgot to mention in the previous post that we had received good news from John and Jule the day before; it turns out they had no troubles at the Embassy, and in fact after getting their paperwork taken care of, they enjoyed several wine tours and great meals at their fancy hotel, so alls well that ends well. With that news in hand, it was time to drive to Puerto Montt to pick them up at the airport so that we could all travel to Bariloche, Argentina for Christmas. We had rented what appeared to be (according to pics on the internet) a beautiful house outside of what is generally regarded as "the Switzerland of South America."

We arrive in Puerto Montt in the pouring rain and proceed to juggle our way through the boondoggle of trading in one car, getting names changed on the official paperwork for the border crossing (mucho bureaucracy in the norm in Chile), finding the Hertz office to drop of the other car (the office they tried to send us too had closed), and the finally picking up John and Jule at the Airport (again, all in the pouring rain).

The family is finally together again, and we take off for Bariloche, which will turn out to be a very long but beautiful drive across the Andes into Argentina. Everything we see along the way is extremely pretty, but with the weather the way it is, we can´t see any of the massive mountains that we can only assume are looming on both sides.

After several hours, we come to the Chilean border crossing. We spend about 30 minutes inside shuttling from line to line until we are finally cleared to leave the country. Of course, we still have to travel 15 more minutes to arrive at the Argentinean border control, where we had to go through the exact same process. Luckily, budget had done a good job of preparing the 5 pages of notarized paperwork necessary to take a car across the border, so soon thereafter we are finally street legal in Argentina and we drive the remaining two hours to arrive in Bariloche just before dark. It appears to be an extremely charming town, but we are so focused on getting to our house that we barely notice. We meet up with the booking agent, and she leads us up into the hills, where we finally see the house where we are to spend the next 6 days. I will let the house speak for itself for now: