Dec. 8 - Desert Adventure and long drive to La Serena

We got up, had breakfast, and the four of us loaded up the Pugeout, now fondly named Peppy, to head south to La Serena - reportedly 6 hours away on the Pan American Highway. But first, just a QUICK stop in the desert to hunt for dinosaur fossils. Rich and Betsy had actually found several the day before with a guide from the Dome and we were anxious to try our luck, too. The way to the good hunting area was on a dirt road off a side road off a side road off the main road. Right. Rich said he knew the way and after looking around for the dirt road for a while we found one that led us back into the desert. The "road" branched off several times and became more of just tracks as we headed deeper into the desert.

Eventually we thought we were at the place and "parked" (stopped) and got out to look for fossils. We hunted around for about an hour and eventually found some cool stuff. We all have some 3-5 million year old shark teeth to show for our efforts. But we still had a long drive ahead and so we loaded back into Peppy and headed back out.

Unfortunately, "out" was hard to find. We tried a couple of different roads and didn´t find the way we came in. However, we found a pretty good dirt road - it was just over a small berm of sand. Just up and over. It would be easy. Well, it wasn´t. We got stuck. Then trying to get out we got stuck more. Soon enough a good portion of the bottom of the car was in sand and the wheels were doing nothing but spinning in sand wells.

We were in the middle of nowhere, there was nothing but sand and rocks, and we were really stuck. It was a long 2 hour process, but obviously we eventually got out.

It took a lot of dirty work in hot dry weather. We jacked up the car resting the jack on rocks, and dug out underneath the car with a 2 x 4 that we had found by an old shack down the road. Then we created rock roads under the wheels. We brought the car down on the rock roads and finally were able to back the car out of the hole. YEA!!

We still needed a way out, though. We drove around carefully for about 15 more minutes then found a place where the berm to the dirt road wasn´t quite so big. Everyone but Carrie got out of the car and she gunned it over the berm Dukes of Hazzard style. YEE HAW! Man, we loved that solid dirt road right about then. We eventually got back to the side roads, then the main road, and onto the Pan American. A brief stop in Caldera for groceries for lunch on the road and we were on our way to La Serena.

Continued...

We finally got to La Serena around dark and were greeted by a byzantine maze of one way streets that were seemingly designed to keep us away from the section of town where out Hostal lie. We eventually made it to the front door only to be told that they had already filled our rooms (since we had neglected to confirm them) and that they could not help us find additional confirmation since the town "was booked" for the weekend. Now it was completely dark as we headed to the beach front where we had been told there were mucho hotels, figuring that we would just pound the pavement until something came up. After 7 or 8 trys Betsy found a place that had a single room and bunks beds. Not too promising, but we jumped on it like kids on a trampoline. Turns out we ended up with a 2 bed, 2 bath suite with a full kitchen and living room for the same price as a hostal. Everything seems to work out if you give it some time...

After unloading our stuff, we found a fantastic restaurant for dinner where we had empanadas and homemade fettuccine Alfredo. A fantastic ending to a long day!