First fly back to Toronto

I´m sitting in the Maple Leaf Lounge in Toronto´s Pearson International Airport, sipping some Canadian red wine, thinking about the past 8 days I spent in Toronto. Finding the right words to describe the trip is difficult.

In the last 7 months our lives have been completely disrupted; we moved half way across the world as a family, away from everything and everyone who is familiar to us. We had only ourselves to depend on. We started essentially new jobs and attended new schools, in a completely new language. We all have made new friends and are well underway in building a support network. As a result, I feel like a fundamentally different person than I was when I was in this airport lounge back on September 10^th, 2010 when we left Toronto for Santiago.

As it turns out, 7 months is not a long time in the real world. 7 months is shorter than many of my projects at Deloitte. It is not uncommon to go without seeing close friends for more than 7 months, even though we always promise to get together more frequently. Often I go 7 months without seeing many of my colleagues. So, after an intense week reconnecting with friends and colleagues, I realize that even though the last 7 months have been transformative and seemed more like years to me, it is really not a big deal for everyone else. I also realized that within a few days I can fall back into my old life and function like it never really actually happened… like moving to Chile was some sort of bizarre dream.

It has been an awesome week visiting with the family, friends and colleagues that I´ve missed so much. I was ready to come back to Toronto and face my old life head-on, with the confidence that I feel like we´re now settled and well adjusted in Santiago. I already have no regrets about making the move that we did and know that we will look back on this experience fondly for the rest of our lives. I´m excited about the promise of bi/trilingualism. I also know that my boys are growing up nurturing their adventurous spirit and have already seen so much that makes them realize how large the world really is and how lucky they are to be born into relative privilege. As for us, I know that Jeremy and I will learn and grow in different ways than if we stayed on the “fast but boring track” of our careers in Toronto, but I am confident that this unique experience will pay off over the long term. We wanted a change and we got more than we bargained for, but I can confidently say that we would not have it any other way.

I am now savoring the thought of embracing my three incredible boys in just over 12 hours… I can´t wait to get home to Santiago…

Road trip to Mendoza, Argentina

Our third group of visitors, Chris and Sarah from Pemberton, BC, arrived for a visit a couple weeks after Jeremy's parents left. After spending the first weekend touring around to our favourite haunts near Santiago, we decided to spend the second weekend together by taking a road trip to Mendoza, Argentina.

For the first time we left our kids with our wonderful nanny Angelica for the weekend. Angelica brought her son over for a sleepover and the three boys enjoyed a weekend filled with pizza parties, movies, bike riding and a trip to the airplane exhibit at a nearby park. Meanwhile, the four adults took an 8 hour road trip through the mountains to wine country in Mendoza, Argentina.

The journey to Mendoza was by far the most impressive part of the trip. There were harrowing upward climbs (33 zig zags, to be exact) before reaching the very disorganized Argentinian boarder, where we waited about 2 hours to enter the country. Once past the boarder the mountain pass opened up to impressive views on both sides and a giant cavern formed by an ancient river that once cut through the mountains. The largest mountain outside of the Himalayas, Aconcagua, is an impressive sight that lies directly on the boarder and is a popular trekking destination. We did some walking in the national park near Aconcagua on the way back and it was inspirational.

Mendoza is a small but pretty city surrounded by wineries that are famous for Argentinian malbec. After some searching and a few disappointments, we joined a last minute English tour at the Norton winery, which is the biggest winery in Mendoza. Incidentally the other four people on the tour were also Canadians and we had a wonderful time with them. Two middle aged ladies (sisters, on a "girls trip" to Argentina) were on their third tour of the day and spectacularly tipsy, which made the tour that much more amusing! The tour itself was impressive - we spent about 2 hours going through various parts of the facility and tasting wine at each stage of the process. The tour ended in the cellar where we saw the owner's personal collection of aged wines, some of which were 80-100 years old.

The food in Argentina is spectacular and we indulged in some great meals the two nights we stayed in Mendoza, as well as "a few" really great glasses of wine. I made the mistake of letting Jeremy and Chris take charge of selecting the hotel without supervision, which resulted in us staying in the Ritz (which was not at all ritzy like its name implied). This error necessitated us staying OUT of the hotel as much as possible, so we made sure we explored and took in the night life of Mendoza while there!!!

Overall, Mendoza is a wine lover's paradise and a definite must see, but driving there is certainly the best part! A side benefit is that it is much easier to import a case of malbec when you take your car instead of the plane :)

A visit to Pucon in the Lake District

Yes, yes, yes, I am WAY behind on my blog! I am playing catch-up now and have a few blogs that are ready to post.

About 1 week after Alison's parents left after a 5 week visit, Jeremy's parents arrived! Keeping with our short little tradition with visitors, we decided to rent another fabulous house for a few days, this time in the South within Chile's lake district in a town called Pucon.

The most notable feature about Pucon is the fact that it lies just beneath an active volcano - Volcan Villarrica. Our only other experience with volcanos was in Indonesia (Agung and Batur, in Bali - both of which we climbed), which were like smallish mountains with the tops cut off and only when you get really close to the crater at the center do you see a tiny bit of smoke rising upwards. Villarrica is quite different than this. First of all, it is massive and covered with snow all year round. Also, it features a large plume of smoke. Most importantly, the volcano is so active that it glows red at night. The house we rented had great views from the front and the back, of both the volcano and the lake. On the second night Jeremy awoke in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom and ended up dragging me to the window to see the glowing volcano. I'm pretty much blind without contacts so I fumbled for my glasses in the dark so that I could get a look at what he was talking about, because I didn't believe it. But it was true - the volcano glows red at night. This startling amount of activity explains why Pucon has a sign in the town that reports how active the volcano is each day! What a place!

Along with volcanos come hot springs. On our first full day in Pucon it poured rain. We decided to pick the most remote hot springs that were on the map (just about 5 km from the Argentinian boarder, way up in the mountains) and dragged Jeremy's parents along on the quest. Pretty soon we were on dirt, washed out roads and crossing rivers on log bridges, thinking we would never find the illusive hot springs we were looking for. Eventually we came to a retreat nestled in the middle of the forest on the mountain and were greeted by an Austrian volunteer (very strange, but she enjoyed speaking German with Jeremy's Dad). The hot springs was basically a bunch of cabins in the woods, with 5 different pools in various locations in the woods, along rivers and streams. In the pouring rain, we enjoyed each and every pool, picking raspberries along the paths in between. If you are going to be wet, you might as well be really wet and in warm water, we reasoned! It was a perfect way to spend a miserable rainy day!

Jeremy and I also had the opportunity to sneak away for an awesome 16 km hike at the base of the volcano, which had stunning views and a wide variety of terrain that varied from lava trails from the last eruption in 1971, to forests, to alpine fields. There is a small ski hill (closed for the summer season) within the national park that scales the side of the volcano. Among other things, we enjoyed old fashioned kuchen from a local bakery, star gazing from the roof top hot tub, homemade pizza from the house pizza oven, fresh raspberries from the garden, a traditional Mapuchu meal and a brisk dip in the glacier fed lake at playa blanca.

We are big fans of BBC Earth in our house - it is one of the kids' favourite DVD box sets - and incidentally there are several parts that feature various areas of Chile, including Pucon. One of the scenes from the video is the ancient forests near the base of Villarrica (posted in this blog).

Overall, although Pucon is absolutely packed with vacationers in the summer months, it is a beautiful area of Chile to visit, particularly if you avoid the town itself and spend your time in the surrounding areas. We're eager to return to the South and head much further South next time into Patagonia, but that will need to wait until next summer!