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| Part of Toby's street dog photography project in Puerto Natales |
February 16th - I have been guilty of over-curating my blogs. I guess we have always cherry picked what we choose to save as memories, but today we have so many ways to filter our lives it is easy for us all to end up thinking that everyone else is having a GREAT TIME! So by way of a little redress here are some notes from the front lines of the day-to-day.
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Buying butter, safe hands goalie gloves
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I have already at times laboured the minutiae of trip planning in the age of covid, detailing the endless form filling, testing and vaccination proof requirements, but there is the other side of life too. The age old need to feed and cloth ourselves, find shelter, and exercise our young (I'm sure that once happened unaided).
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| These folk are all over town |
Take today for example. Today was a moving day. We had been unable to book one Airbnb for the whole of our time in Puerto Natales, so we found two to cover the stay. We have been using mainly Airbnb, augmented by a little booking.com for our accommodation all year. Whatever flaws Airbnb may have, it is a very user friendly platform making is it easy to find places, book, change and cancel. And we have done plenty of all of those. Most recently when our complicated little trip in a few weeks around the Austral Highway and Chiloe got scuppered by a full ferry. We re-jigged our dates, managed to book the ferry by enlisting the help of Crystal's tirelessly helpful Mum (Nonno provides moral support but make no mistake: the engine room of the admin machine is definitely Mum), and were then left with a slew of accommodation to move. That was easy. In fact the problem with the ferry was the Webpay platform that most businesses in Chile use. It rejects a huge proportion of foreign card transactions.
In the same way that Airbnb works for accommodation, for all our Patagonia plans, we have been using an agent called TodoPatagonia. They have been responsive to emails, communicate in excellent English (our Spanish is embarrassingly non existent despite some consistent duolingo efforts), and they have an alternative payment system for foreigners.
But back to the moving. We ate breakfast, used the bathroom, got dressed, packed our bags, emptied our apartment, walked 50m around the corner and moved in. One feature of Airbnb is that you don't see the exact location until after you book. We got lucky with how close these places are. Then we made lunch, bought milk, and now we are having quiet time. Quiet time has been a mainstay of our family harmony management policy. Whenever possible, one hour, normally after lunch, on your own. I think I had something similar as a kid. We spend a lot of time together as a family, and the kids are playing with each other from dawn til dusk, so this is a really valuable buffer/reset/refresh. Today, I used quiet time to blog, make coffee, check some Airbnb reservations, finalise some trekking reservations, and to create an account at Carleton University so I can register Toby for hockey tomorrow.
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| Lots of play structures, skate parks and this astroturf field in Puerto Natales |
Yesterday we went to Torres del Paine national park on a tour. It was excellent. I will write about it separately! The day before we dealt with a clogged toilet that overflowed. We had to get a plunger and cleaning supplies from our host who speaks no English. We also had a family trip to the play structure and the grocery stores and we made our packed lunch for the following day's tour. Dinner was pasta bolognaise, made in the simple kitchen with a paucity of utensils. It was delicious and nutritious.
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We took this picture to show Nonno our Italian flag dinner...
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...cooked in this kitchen; basic, mostly effective
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Superbowl halftime show
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Valentine's day jello production
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| Waiting in the rain for the bus to Torres del Paine |
Other things that fill our day are managing the device charging rotation (we have a bag of chargers and international adapters but only two wall sockets that work here), finding places to do laundry (occasionally), doing a little bit of school work with the kids, and planning, planning, planning... Not time for enough reading but Crystal and I do keep our sometimes Netflix habit going of an occasional evening. Ozark at the moment. Yes, we still need distraction and unwinding!
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Our bag of electronics cables
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| The fruteria opposite our place. Gotta have fruit |
I won't dissect in detail the family niggles and nagging, spousal arguments, emotional meltdowns, and what-we-have-here are failures to communicate. Suffice to say they is. But we have learnt a lot over the course of the nearly 8 months that we have been out of our house. Most valuable lesson: pacing, I think. If we are travelling one day, don't plan anything for the following day, and maybe for two days. If we do a full day family activity, plan nothing for the next day. When Crystal and I were first together, we would divide the day up into morning, afternoon and evening, and sometimes have plans for each of those periods! Now it's one activity a day and if it overlaps more than one of those periods, then the next day should be a rest day. This seems to give us time to do our admin work and the kids time to be kids. They need to process these big new experiences and they need time goofing around with Spotify, building forts, playing with their stuffies, throwing the ball around.
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Scaling the skate park
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There's a little behind the scenes. Normal service will be resumed in the next post.
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