Sightseeing with Mom and Dad

Everyone here has been telling us we need to leave Santiago and visit some of the sites outside of the city. Top recommendations include: mountain ski resorts, nearby beaches, Southern Chile lake district, wine country, thermal springs, etc. The thing is we would love to visit all of these places...Chile truly is an amazing country with an unbelievably varied geography. But we can barely manage to get around Santiago itself. With our driving issues and my fear of heights (new!) issue. So for now we smile politely when people tell us about all of the trips we should be doing. Some friends have gone as far as telling us they will take us themselves to see these places before we leave. We'll see...

But we finally did decide to leave Santiago and visit Valparaiso and Viña del Mar with my parents (just me and my parents...Steve stayed home with the girls). Valparaiso is an old, gritty port city with colorful homes built all up and down the mountains. Viña is an expensive beach front resort area a few miles away from Valparaiso. The clincher for this trip was that I found a tour that would pick us up at our house with a 15 passenger van and bring us to these cities for a guided tour. And recall that we live a fair bit outside of the downtown area and downtown hotels...so I was thrilled that they would pick us up.

It was a great trip. We saw the sites. Some walking, some driving. Our tour guide, Luis, spoke passable English. We unexpectedly stopped at a vineyard along the way (one of the other people on the tour asked for this stop) and we got to do some wine tasting. We had a lunch at a beach-front restaurant in Reñaca (close to Viña). There were two Australian couples on our tour too. They were very nice and were just starting a 29 day tour around all of South America! We had lunch with them and learned that they often take one of these mega trips around the world. I do remember that Aussies love to travel!