37.6 mi / 10.4 mph / 1374 ft. climbing
Home: Sergio’s AirBNB

The winds were expected to be somewhat less-friendly than they had been yesterday, so we had the alarm set for 5:30am, when the skies are just beginning to lighten. The goat-guarding dogs would go on random barking sprees through the night, and the latest one was timed just before our alarm anyway. It was 45°F, but with calm air in our hollow, felt reasonably comfortable. There was a little condensation on the rainfly, but overall it was a nice camping experience for the first time in our tent in nearly a month.

The hills on the “direct route” offshoot we took yesterday to reach our destination made me wonder if it would have been better to continue straight along the highway longer and then backtrack. But when we used that “backtrack” to return to the highway this morning, the answer was definitely “no!” The gravel hills were even spikier than they had been on the way in, and by the time we were pushing our bikes up the final hill to re-connect with the highway, it felt like we’d burned 20% of the day’s energy in the first two miles.

Back on the highway, Monday morning’s increased traffic proved how lucky we had been to exit Concepción on a Sunday. Though there was surely some location-dependency too, since it definitely got busier after we passed the town of Nacimiento. We were passed by at least 30 empty logging trucks in 20 miles, but oddly only saw one full one returning in the other direction. The narrow shoulder and frequent too-close-passing vehicles are the combination that usually spirals Rett’s fear into simmering anger, but for some reason (I wish I knew!) she seemed completely unbothered today. It certainly helped that the drivers of the biggest vehicles (the logging trucks) were the most-respectful ones on the road.

We hadn’t heard anything from tonight’s AirBNB host until Rett pinged him again this morning; many hosts here prefer to communicate over WhatsApp rather than the AirBNB app, which is annoying because we not only lose AirBNB’s record-keeping, but also its auto-translating. Anyway, we’d asked about the possibility of check-in before the official 3pm time, and during a roadside cheesecake break, we heard back, and he said it would actually be best if we could arrive before 1:30pm. Generally for us, the earlier the check-in, the better, so we did some quick calculations regarding our route, and said sure, we can make it there by 1:30!

That means that rode nearly non-stop the rest of the way. At Coihue, the heat maps show that most cyclists have continued straight south. But thankfully, Scott Diamond wrote a recent report suggesting that the heat maps may be out-of-date here. The simple two-lane highway that the heat maps light up has recently been “upgraded” into a 4-lane divided highway, and it seems that bicycles are (unusually for Chile) explicitly and prominently banned from it. That knowledge means I had already planned the detour into today’s route, rather than being surprised and forced to figure it out on-the-fly, which surely would have prevented us from reaching our AirBNB in time.

Some orange road signs were a bit confusing to me though, so when a local road cyclist caught us from behind, I tried to ask him if the way to Renaico was open. The language barrier prevented a clear answer as we rode, but he didn’t twist up his face as if we were idiots who were going to run into a dead-end somewhere, so I took that as a positive.

The final hurdle was a 5-mile stretch of gravel road paralleling the highway. I had been hoping that it had been paved as part of the highway upgrade, to provide an alternate route during construction, but the opposite seemed true: a loose bumpy surface that again made us doubt our ability to make our deadline. Thankfully, the surface soon improved, dramatically. It had a near-asphalt smoothness that we could ride at near-asphalt speed, leaving us plenty of time to make a stop at a Renaico grocery store before completing the final mile to a plot of land surrounded by solar panels and windmills. We met our host at 1:15pm. Success!

Our AirBNB (a stand-alone building in the front corner of the yard with a much larger main house) wasn’t the cleanest in the world, but it was spacious and nicely-equipped. The hot water “ran out” while Rett was taking a shower, and thankfully I’ve been in enough South American houses now that I was able to diagnose and solve the problem on my own: the propane tank connected to the on-demand hot water heater had run out, so I swapped it out for a fuller one that was connected to an (unnecessary) space heater in the second bedroom (I did need to search the Internet to learn how to disconnect/reconnect the quick-release regulators though).

We had opened a bunch of windows to cool the place down, which allowed some flies inside. But they’re very unusual flies, who like to just lazily circle in the center of the living room, above the coffee table, for hours. Better that than actually bothering us! So rather than their buzzing in the bedroom, we fell asleep to the muted “thwump” of the nearby windmills spinning just as lazily in the darkness.