Author: neil

The day started like a fall morning, with a pleasant cool bite in the air and crisp blue skies. That meant we were granted a second day with excellent views of Villarica volcano, so we took a little detour back to the waterfront on our way out of town so that Rett could get some…

Way back in Valparaiso, I had roughly plotted out a 33-day ride to Puerto Montt, including a detour across the Argentina border and back. It included a reserve of five off-days, a dangerously-low amount for us, since we’ll frequently burn through five days in a single town without much thought. We’ve already used up two…

With an extra six (uphill) miles to ride due to our AirBNB host’s location screw-up yesterday, we set the alarm for 5am, hoping we could beat the day’s headwinds. We must have been especially motivated, because we efficiently got ourselves out before 7am, and returned to Ruta 5. The legal way for vehicles to go…

The brand new divided highway connecting Coihue and Angol (Ruta 180) very visibly communicates that bicycles are not allowed, which suggests an unfortunate trend toward USA-ism in Chilean transportation (later this day we would see that Ruta 5, the Pan-American Highway and Chile’s central artery, explicitly allows pedestrians, and thus presumably bikes as well). But…

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,…