More pix of Castro and our house

Hola everyone,

The posts are coming fast and furious for now! but soon we will settle into our routine. We spent our first Saturday in Castro at the market loading up on fresh produce and shellfish, then went down the street to the hardware store(!) to get some rubber boots! They are popular here and good for all sorts of things, including exploring the shore below our house when the tide is out. The tides are quite high here - 10-12 feet - so there will be much to explore! We are also discovering that, while it rains here nearly every day, it's also sunny nearly every day - a dark cloud will drift over and spit or drizzle a little, then it will move on and the sun will come out again. We can get used to this!

While Gabi is napping, I'll post a few pictures of our house and Castro:

Here's our place - a little apartment above the garage. It faces just east of north, so it gets a lot of sun.

The doors on the left lead to an auxiliary kitchen for our landlady's house just to the left - we haven't figured that arrangement out yet.





Here's the view across the street from our driveway.






Castro sits up on a bluff above an inlet from the Golfo de Ancud.
Here's the town square and the iglesia.








Here's a view from the edge of the main part of town, looking south toward our house. The little fishing houses on stilts are a big tourist attraction here.


And here is a view from the shore across the inlet from below our house. It reminds us a lot of Tomales Bay, near where Mike grew up. The inlet is a little more windy, and the hills on the other side are higher and steeper, but otherwise it's pretty similar. There is a fish or shellfish farm across the inlet. The tides are high and the inlet is shallow, so at high tide the water laps at the foot of the ladder up to the yard, and at low tide the water is 150m away!