Today was a transit day. Senora Fox passed as we were having breakfast but she didn't stay. We decided to travel via Puerto Varas today to pick up shopping for the next four nights. It has reliable supermarkets, whereas Ensenada only has village stores and we didn't know what Hornopiren has. It's also New Year's Eve tomorrow and then New Year'sDay and everything tends to shut, even restaurants. The journey to Puerto Varas was uneventful and we stocked up at Lid...

The fine weather is back with us. We had a slow start to the day, our plans confounded by the insurance situation. We began the day with a leisurely breakfast. The blog was caught up on and we are both reading books: Kevin is reading Stephen King's Joyland, based in a seaside fair ground, and Joan is reading The Night Circus, a book about competing magicians which seems to be a theme. On the way over she watched one of her favourite films, The Prestige on the pla...

The cabana is very quiet. A few people pass by on their way to the lodge building but in the main, it's very private. Joan woke up to find it raining – not hard rain, but nuisance rain. You can take breakfast here in the main building where they proclaim, we serve black coffee, which we took to mean they serve real coffee and not the powdered Nescafe which is common place. We preferred a take away breakfast which we could eat in the privacy of our cabana. ...

Moving on. It was with some reluctance that we moved on from our cabin overlooking the lake. We headed out of town towards Ruta 5 which in this part of Chile is full metalled and a toll road. Osorno town is about 80 miles from the Puerto Varas junction and we soon found ourselves turning off at the Osorno junction and one again heading east towards the Andes. It says something about the size of Vn Osorno that despite driving an hour away from it, it still looms h...

Our stay here in Puerto Varas has been foreshortened considerably, and though our cabanas let us change the dates, it was only by one day more as they are full. We're not surprised. This is a great place and very efficient. After not much sleep two nights ago and an early start yesterday, Kevin slept in till ten. Joan was up earlier and did the blog and then looked at UK news to find her home village of Whalley had flooded. Nephew Wayne and niece Maxine had been...