More Fun with Family

After the morning's boat ride and penguin and whale-watching we had a great lunch - more seafood, of course. This time it was loco, a delicious shellfish that probably doesn't have an English translation, seeing as it's only found in Chile and southern Peru. Then we were ready for the beach. Fortunately, we left the van behind and took the vehicle with four-wheel drive, or we'd still be there trying to dig ourselves out of the sand. It was an amazingly beautiful beach, and for a long time we had it all to ourselves.



The next day we went four wheeling again, this time to the sand dunes. The kids had a great time running up the dunes and then rolling down. Even Nana was having a blast; she really liked going off road, though she didn't feel much like rolling down any dunes with the kids. We were hoping to see some guanaco, but there were none to be found. We did, however, spot a tarantula in the road. Also, we saw some goats drinking from a fresh-water spring that was right at the shore of the ocean, a rather unusual geological phenomenon, I would think. We stopped at the home of a family that Rodrigo knew to buy some goat's cheese. For generations this family has lived in this isolated spot out in the desert, and taking a look around, it was evident their lifestyle hasn't changed much for the last hundred years.

After our ride out into the desert it was time to head back to La Serena where we would again spend the night before driving back to Santiago tomorrow morning. Before we left, though, one last magical moment in the north: in the clear, late-night sky at Mamalluca Observatory we saw the planet Saturn. What an awesome sight!
On the way home that next day we took a little detour to Fray Jorge National Park. We took a short hike through Fray Jorge, its dense forest vegetation in stark contrast with the semi-desertic climate surrounding the park. Sally and Jan particularly liked the mist blowing in off the ocean and the result it had on their neatly-coiffed heads.

Once in Santiago, we still had a few more days to enjoy, but our time together was going much too quickly. I had a meeting at the Fulbright office on Friday, so Bill and the girls took everyone sightseeing to Cerro San Cristóbal. In the evening Roxy and Sarah had their first-ever big concert: I took them to see La Oreja de Van Gogh, a band from Spain. We had been learning songs off their new CD, Guapa, in the car on this last trip. Everyone else had been getting pretty tired of hearing it again and again, but it was fun for us to be able to sing along at the show.

Saturday our guests went shopping to el Pueblito de los Dominicos and on Sunday we went wine-tasting at a vineyard just outside of Santiago, Concha y Toro. This is where the Casillero del Diablo wine is made. I first heard about this wine when, one day in my first month of teaching here, I walked into the teacher's lounge and there was a broken bottle of wine on the floor. No one seemed to know whose it was or where it had come from, but someone said something about "Casillero del Diablo". I still wasn't understanding a lot of what people were saying in those early days (Chileans have a rather unique Spanish), but I was fairly certain that the tiny little locker allotted each teacher was called a casillero. So I thought that they were explaining that there was a devil in someone's locker who had knocked the bottle out. Actually they were lamenting that someone had lost an expensive bottle of that particular well-known label of wine.

On Saturday night the wine was flowing and the pisco sours, too, as we celebrated a wonderful week together. We invited our Chilean friends and our North American Fulbright friends to join us at our apartment for an asado (a barbecue). The only ones missing were Catherine and Dan, with his guitar. All of us Fulbright teachers realized our incredible summer was coming to an end, everyone would be leaving for their Chilean towns for another semester of teaching, and no one was sure when we would all be together again. We have become quite a close family here together this year in Chile.

Click here to see some silly videos: Sally and Jessie doing the penguin dance, the kids (and Sally) playing on the sand dune, and Lucas acting crazy at Fray Jorge National Park.
http://picasaweb.google.com/bdoody61/KidsAndSallySillyVideos

Here are more photos: http://picasaweb.google.com/bdoody61/TripWithLucasAndJessie