Chile, etc.

Hey friends! I thought I would pop in with an update on travel and ongoing plans for those who are curious, and those who we might randomly end up overlapping with in our travel plans.

We've been in Chile now for about three weeks. The first week we spent basically traveling between the desert north at San Pedro de Atacama and the slightly less desert center of the country in the hills near Santiago. Along the way we stopped at Pan de Azucar NP, a crazy Martian coastline teeming with pelicans and almost entirely devoid of humans. 

After that we stopped in La Serena, a proper Chilean town, to visit with a friend from nursing school (Bridget), her astronomer fiancé Alfredo, and their cat Miles. 

Now we've been in Lo Barnachea for a week and a half or so, at the house of our new friend Amy O'Toole, a Seattleite who has been in SA for years, and who has introduced us to both the area and her big network of trail running friends. 

While we've been here we have also gotten to know John Fiddler and Kathleen Egan, more globe trotting Seattleites, hung out with Susie and Addy Van Den Ameele, and caught up with Jeff Encke and Cassie Hunter, who just happened to be in town, making for an amazing little U.S. Embassy experience. 

On Wednesday morning we fly out to (impossibly) meet up with even more friends from home: Jenn Hughes and Yitka Winn, in Patagonia. We also have plans to meet up with a friend we met in Guatemala who just happens to be there, and there's an outside shot that we'll see a Kiwi friend and a guy my old friend Eliacin put me in contact with recently! Whew!

With all the time spent with Americans, travel in Chile has been a way different experience than travel in Central America!  Friends for miles, which has been both a great way to reconnect with home, and a great way to see a little bit of what expat life is like in Chile.

After three weeks in Patagonia, the plan is to go back to Bolivia for a few more weeks of language classes in Sucre before returning to the U.S. in June.

Once we get there, we are planning to cram in some more hiking and travel, and the plan is to do some contract work in (hopefully) the Seattle area during the summer and fall. After that, we are potentially heading to New Zealand in the winter to hike Te Araroa, assuming everything comes together financially and otherwise!

If anyone has a lead on psych nurse agency work in WA, or Nurse Practitioner contract jobs this summer, let us know! Or better, if anyone wants to join us somewhere along the way, let's do it!