We're back in NYC baby! The 13 hour plane ride was a breeze. Planes have bathrooms (unlike some of those buses down South) so as my Dad said, we really could have ridden forever. It feels great to be back. Hard to believe just two days ago I was in a tank top on the beach in Valparaiso outside of Santiago, Chile and now I'm all bundled up writing this final blog in a Laundromat in Brooklyn. No more Internet café around every corner. We've been in a hostel in t...

Yesterday we had a quintessential Patagonia travel experience. We arrived in the southern Chilean city of Punta Arenas with plans to blog and take care of "business" in preparation for heading home in less than a week. That didn't happen. Instead we met a friendly young woman, Rosa, at the bus station, who convinced us to stay at her family's residency. After getting burned a few times on these deals we typically try to read reviews of hostels before ...

We spent election night holed up against the wind in our hostel in Calafate, Patagonia. At 2am I started to drift off and Josh woke me in time for McCain's concession and Obama's victory speech. I was moved to tears. I am truly proud to be an American today. To celebrate we ate a big Argentinean steak and smoked a Cuban cigar :) The day before the election we hiked on Perito Moreno Glacier - so big and so beautiful. We endured a 30-hour bus trip to get down here...

We're in a hippie town called El Bolson in the Argentine Lake District. At first we felt disoriented because we didn't see very many hippies around town, but the artisan fair we went to today more than made up for it. I drank homemade beer, ate a waffle sandwich, listened to my partner explain why he's like a sparrow, and bought a hippie-ish hat. On a Tuesday! We decided that while we aren't quite hippies we're not totally yuppies either, so we thought we'd call ...

We crossed the border from Bolivia into Chile yesterday and could tell we had entered a more developed country by the availability of sugar substitutes, the substantial girth of the stray dogs, and a lack of random electrical wiring coming out of buildings and our hotel shower. Unfortunately development comes with a price: we spent more in our first day in Chile than we had spent our last three days in La Paz combined. It turned out that we spent the least amou...