Sunday 8th January 2012

Some of you may recall that we did the same as this a few years ago (also in English - sorry for this for our Danish readers!) but then it was an ordinary e-mail with a highly interesting weekly account of our travels in Argentina, Brazil and Chile attached in a Word document.

So this is our first attempt at a "blog" and will be supplemented with a photo or two on a Google Picasa web album.

The title refers to a weekly radio (do you rember that?) by the late Alistair Cooke. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alistair_Cooke

So this is the first week that started on New Year ’s Day when we checked in at Kastrup airport en route for Santiago de Chile via Frankfurt and Madrid.

We were pretty exhausted after having had only 5 hours sleep after having had 14 guests (in actual fact it was 13 but we laid the table for 14) for New Year and left for the airport just after lunch. Eventually the journey took exactly 28 hours from door to door. The longest leg was obviously Madrid to Santiago with over 14 hours in the air. The flight was operated by LANChile by Airbus 340 and was quite bumpy at times in the middle of the night until we reached the coast of Brazil. After an hour getting through customs we ventured outside the airport building to bright sunshine and 33 degrees C!

For the first time we took the LANChile coach directly to Viña del Mar instead of arranging for the family to pick us up at the airport for the one and a half hour journey to the coast.

Paty and Ivette (my 2 sisters-in-law) met the coach at the terminus and straight home to a welcome glass of champagne and a big lunch on the patio – in the shade.

In no time at all we showered after the journey, unpacked and changed into much lighter clothes…we were home again!

The first week was spent settling in (also mentally), buying things we needed but didn´t take with us because for the first time ever we only had a baggage allowance of 23 kg which is not that much compared to the 64 kg we have been used to in the past. Just one pair of shoes weighs 1 kg but fortunately it is summer here so we had taken no heavy winter things. How do you pack for almost 3 months?

Friday was spent all day on the golf course at the Granadilla Country club now Paty has started playing and Gonzalo (my brother-in-law) has now begun to take the day off on a Friday after working 2 days in Viña an 2 in Santiago and has moved all his Friday patients!

The weekend is traditionally family and we were 8 for lunch and dinner on Saturday relaxing and lazing by the swimming pool – it’s a tough life. Sunday we parked the car close to the beach and walked to Concón http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conc%C3%B3n but in the end only got halfway as it was too hot and stopped a microbus back to the car!