Monday January 14, 2019
Hello friends and family,
At the end of our first week we find
ourselves in Santa Cruz in the midst of the wine country. We spent three days in Santiago putting the
bicycles together, getting sim cards for the phone, trying to find good local
maps (not possible) and other little details for getting started on our
adventure. Great walking street closed
to all traffic and bikes lanes scattered throughout the town. Many people commuting by bicycle. Even the Chile Automobile Association has
quit printing maps as everyone it seems just uses their phone – hard to get a
big picture of a country that is 2,500 miles end to end but I brought a National Geographic map of
Chile which will work but not great detail.
Headed off for a 90+ kilometer first day
which due to a road detour turned into one of our 9 ½ hour days on the bike
including 2 hours on their freeway (ugly for sure) and another 12
kilometers. I guess we can still do it
but on the first day –uggggghhh.
Second day finally out into the country and grapes and fruit trees
everywhere. Fruit is beautiful and
berries galore. We had a small section
(an hour) on road construction and dirt and for the first time in 18 years of
our adventure I fell in some loose gravel – not bad – BUT Mary Lou who was
behind could not stop and road right over me or into me and ontop of me. A few scrapes and bruises and lots of dirt –
nothing some really good Chilean dark rum and juice did cure.
We are now in Santa Cruz, after passing
by or thru San Diego, San Francisco, Santa Rosa, sounds like we were riding in
California. It looks like it as well. The fruit trees are in various states of
development. Plums are getting ripe, apples are just developing and the spring
berries are amazing!!
There are bakeries and pastry shops
everywhere…. So hard for me to walk by one with out having a story about home
and our bakery. Bread truly is the staff of life here. Breakfast is ham cheese
rolls and butter with pure juices and caffeine coffee. I brought a lot of
decafe tea.
We went to a winery yesterday, a very small
one and no one else was in the tasting room so we spent 2 hours with the young
women learning what was so special about their wine.
Only 5 employees, hand picked grapes,
hand bottled. The land has been in the family for 4 generations and is now
called Laura Hartwig . Even the Chardonnay was so smooth and silky with out
being oily that I enjoyed it and 7 tastes of red wine. We had a private tour
and learned more about their process. It was somewhat different than the
process we learned about recently in Canada.
In the morning we leave for the
coast. Right now there is no power and
the manager says this is unusual. We have found Chile to be very much on par
with the US in many ways. The roads have been good, the city clean and most of
all we are enjoying the people. They have been interested and helpful with
directions and the Spanish I have learned has been very helpful. I find they
understand me but speak so fast I can not pick up all they say.
Here they use the credit cards for every
thing, an ID number is to be entered for anything you buy so the government can
keep track of what you spend and pay checks are deposited so they know what you
make.
I hope we never get to that point.
We are off for a day ride to work off the
great pastries we had for breakfast.
