January 30th 2014
A big wood stove in the middle of the dining room - bedrooms upstairs with an overheated bathroom. Hot soup with chunks of meat and three smiling women serving us tea after serving us lunch. Quiet, clean and plenty to eat - feeling restored again the next day greeted us with sunshine and breathtaking beauty.
The road took us along the lakes - which lake, I can't tell....I am surely all mixed up about the name of the lakes and it doesn't really matter - we are on the C. Austral - dirt all the way to the end and beyond, crossing into Argentina again, but, in the mean time.....our frenchis -the couple we had been riding with on and off -had set up their recumbent bikes in the front yard of the place they had set up camp so we can see it from the road when we come by. We had "lost them" a few days before when they headed out it the pouring rain and I couldn't get going because I kept hoping the rain would just go away while I was hiding under my sleeping bag....Anyhow, we were delighted to hook up with them again and joint them at the camp under the cherry trees. Dinner that night was had in a big wooden structure with a fire place and a kitchen sink. We shared the space with another cycling couple heading north. In front of the roaring fire each couple eating their own prepared food shared some stories - most impressive to me was listening to the 65 and 69 year old German couple in perfect english, talking about the beginning of the C. Austral at O'Higgins and some of their cycle stories in other countries and continents as well. Deemed "crazy" by their children in their late 30s and their grandchildren as well, these two left me in awe!!
All six of us were ready at the same time next morning and headed off into a sunny day. I caught a picture of the two riding off into the north and us four - happy about being reunited again, decorated with cherries (they were unbelievably tasty too!) following the road to Cochrane which was still too far to pedal in one day with some fairly steep hills in between. But the weather kept us in a good mood and the bag of cherries quite cheerful.
We stopped in a little village by the beautiful river Baker
which will follow us all the way to Crochane and amaze us with it's deep turquoise every time we have a chance to look at it considering our eyeballs were bouncing around in our heads from the rocky road and we had to concentrate on what is right in front of us.
We bought six eggs in this tiny store - before they even made to the bike four of them broke on the sidewalk while placed down on the concrete with the grocery bag. The kind store owner lady came running out to hand us four new and intact eggs......GRACIAS!!!! I had a hankering for a fried egg that whole day and I was about to cry over the spilled eggs. Now we had six "good ones" again and I wrapped each one in a bandana, took my fanny pack out of my front handle bar bag and placed them - ever so careful- like it was a nest and the new borns about to hatch...little did I know that the ripio (south american word for dirt road which is meant none discriminative, but for us it sounds like it stands for the undeniable washboard pattern that can drive a person on a bicycle insane wile riding on it for hours and days, weeks and month). And washboard it was - another 11km to a campground we knew we wanted to spend the night at. Only two eggs didn't make it, but the rest were actually ok. Eggs were had for dinner and breakfast, but the rain woke us up with the baby kitty sleeping on top of the tent and underneath the rain fly. A cute little curled up kitty speck which helped ease the pain of the rain...especially when we opened the door and that little fur ball came purring in and we had some quality snuggle time before heading to Cochrane.... chased by black clouds.
