Hello everybody!

This is the first posting to our blog of our adventure in Chile! As we have threatened, we will post to it occasionally to let you know what we're up to and what we're seeing and doing.

We leave on July 22! We'll fly into Santiago (the capital, which is right in the middle of the country), where we've booked a spot at a hostel close to downtown. We'll stay there for a week while Lisa goes through a training session; then we'll find out where we'll be living! We hope to round up a friend of a friend to show us around and help us figure things out.

For now, we're getting everything set up at home to run automatically while we're gone, and we're trying to figure out how to fit everything we want to keep into two rooms and the basement. We're giving a lot of stuff away... It's a good motivator for a purge. Mike's parents will fly out for a week beforehand to watch/get some quality time with the kids, which will be a big help.

We will try to find a place with an extra bedroom for our friends to stay when they visit! Let us know if you can head down this way, and we'd love to show you around.

A lot of what we've learned about Chile has come from "Travels in a Thin Country" by Sara Wheeler. I don't think we'll be traveling the way she did, but she gives vivid descriptions of the countryside and the people she meets.

More news once we get closer!
- Mike & Lisa