Our third day in Montana, we dedicated to visiting Glacier National Park. We started the day by going to breakfast at Echo Lake Café, a nearby roadside restaurant that specialized in the most amazing Breakfast Burrito I've ever had. An enormous flour tortilla filled with scrambled eggs, jack cheese, sautéed mushrooms, green peppers, onions, homemade Chorizo, tomatoes and black olives. They topped it with ranchero sauce and sour cream! Add to that home-fried potatoes. Needless to say, we ended up with to go boxes for a good portion of the meal! Afterwards, we made our way to the park, which met all our expectations as far as beautiful and spectacular views. We took the fabled Going-to-the-Sun Road, an incredible piece of engineering that took us through amazing views, steadily climbing to cross the Continental Divide. Unfortunately, ... read more

At our arrival in Montana after a long and convoluted flight, our exceptional host met us at the airport in Bigfork for the drive to our home for the next few days, his amazing house on the slopes on a nearby mountain. The drive to the house itself was through beautiful countryside along Montana Hwy 83 out of Bigfork, and the curving road to the house itself slowly climbed through a beautiful forest of trees. The neighbors were few and far between, which provided a feeling of isolation and peacefulness in beautiful surroundings. The house itself was rustic in appearance and perfectly comfortable, with wide glass windows opening level with the ground in the back, and featuring a shaded balcony off the ground in the front. After a quick tour of his property, which backs into ... read more

On Thursday, we signed up with a local company, Turistik, for the ride to the Coast to visit Pablo Neruda’s seashore home, Isla Negra. The tour offered the best of both worlds, the opportunity to see this Museum and, afterwards, a visit to a new organic winery in one of Chile’s youngest wine producing valleys, San Antonio. One of their vans was picking us up at 8:15 AM in front of the W Hotel, and taking us to their main depot area in the Parque Araucano Shopping Center to meet the vehicle designated for this particular tour. It is a well-organized enterprise that we had used in the past. The drive to Neruda’s house was heading south on the Costanera highway. It reminds me somewhat or the Florida’s Turnpike in that it has Toll stations along ... read more

Our last day In Punta Arenas was at leisure. We got up at a civilized time, and had one of those giant breakfasts that were inevitable at the hotels. I honestly had every intention of not eating very much, because we had two additional food stops planned for that day, but it is impossible not to eat in excess at these occasions. We checked out the Spa and pool area in the hotel, which was spectacular, and also did a walkabout of the Casino, which was not too large, by our standards, but nice. Our hotel was perfectly located, only a couple of blocks from the Plaza Mayor, where we headed to look at some of the goods in the stalls that dot the entire plaza. Lots of wool goods, as you can imagine. Legend says ... read more

At 7:30 Saturday morning, after another mind boggling breakfast, our driver Miguel and his wife, Sybill, picked us up for our crossing into Argentina and El Calafate. We were warned that the border crossing requires lots of patience and that it can get really backed up during heavy tourist season. There are two windows, and a couple of guys processing a considerble amout of peole. Even though we had tried to get an early start, we got stuck behind one of those obnoxiously large tourist buses that create a crowd just by themselves. Holy Cow! It was a slow process to say the least. At last, we got through the bureocratic nonsense and got back in the van heading down this dirt and rocks road (did I mention most of the roads were dirt roads?) towards ... read more