Dave & Meredith’s Travel Blog

We´re getting ready to go to the airport to travel to the Galapagos. Last night we had our farewell dinner with our tour group.

Last Group Picture

We had dinner in a private room at our hotel in El Calafate. When we arrived, we saw a slideshow of pictures that one of our tour leaders, Melissa, took on the trip. They were great photos of both landscapes and people.

After a tasty dinner and some of that fabulous Argentine red wine, our tour leaders Irene and Melissa said some really nice things about all of us and the trip, Dave showed some of the pictures he has taken, and I sang “I´ll Be Seeing You”, which I thought was an appropriate goodbye song.

We had an amazing time in Patagonia, and we made many new friends. Dave and I have met people on every trip we´ve been on. Usually, we find one or two that we bond with and keep in touch with afterward. This trip to Patagonia is different - we plan to keep in touch with everyone we met. Such a warm, friendly, interesting group of people. And they have our blog address now, so, I´ll officially welcome Irene, Melissa, Alex, Cathy, Rainer, Joy, David, Laurie, Jim and Donna to our blog.

In our last episode, we were in El Calafate, about to leave to cross the Chilean border and enter Torres del Paine National Park. It was a long day of travel but it was sunny and the views were outstanding which made it pretty pleasant. When you enter the high plains near the border, the winds accelerate to an incredible level. It was amazing. We got out to take the cliche picture of me near the “Welcome to Chile” sign and the second I stepped off the bus, my hat flew off and I spent the next minute or two chasing it down the road. Every time I thought I had it, I’d reach out for it and it would blow away. Like a cartoon. The rest of the group had a good laugh.

The “Paine” in Torres del Paine was a local native word for blue so the name means “The Blue Towers”. Although the park is very large and contains many lakes, glaciers, and other mountains, the centerpiece is a set of spires made mostly of granite but, due to a quirk of formation, each has a band of darker, sedimentary rock at the top (the “blue”). We stayed at a ranch, did several hikes while there, and had a great drive around the park. It was incredibly hot but we took a hike out to a lunch spot one day that overlooked a turquoise lake with mountains behind it. Outstanding views! The guides said that just a couple of weeks before, the winds were so strong (which apparently is typical) that that group could not make it that far down the trail.

I was able to spend an early morning heading out before sunrise to a decent spot to photograph the alpenglow on the towers. The shots came out very well.

We fly out of El Calafate in a few hours to travel to Quito (via Lima).Since we’ll have no Internet on the boat in the Galapagos, we’ll try to post one last time before leaving Quito. Ciao.