La Serena - Temuco (1,233km)

First thing Monday, I ran around getting my motorcycle paperwork up-to-date - insurance, road taxes etc ... then had a fantastic lunch at John-Micheal's parents house where my bike was stored :-)

That evening I met up with some of my former group from Gemini at a nice restaurant in town. It was good to see them again. I then returned to Las Tacas to prepare for my ride home.

I had every intention of leaving at the crack of dawn, but that ended up being 09:30! It took me a while to pack up the bike and close-up the apartment, but I felt better for a more relaxed departure.

The road conditions were fair, quite cold and foggy between Las Tacas and Los Vilos. The plus side was there was very little wind which can be quite fierce. Things warmed up when I got closer to Santiago. Traffic was quite heavy through the city center, and practically nobody respects motorcylces so you have to be ultra alert at all times and try and stay out of harms way, which is not easy in heavy multi-lane traffic.

I was glad to clear Santiago, my target was a hotel in Curico which marked approximately the half way point. 600km in one day is a long ride, my upper body was really suffering and to make matters worse it was getting dark and I had another 100km or so to go. The risks rise significantly riding at night, poor visibility and it was getting really cold and foggy again!

I stayed at this hotel during my ride up to La Serena last year, so I knew exactly where is was and was very relieved to get there in one piece. I immediately took a very long hot shower and got an early nights sleep.

Breakfast at 07:30, and I was back on the road again at 08:30 ... another 600km to go. Conditions were much the same cold and foggy. I stopped every 150km or so to refuel and warm-up with hot coffee. Fortunately, I had no problems with the bike - in all a very smooth ride despite the cold.

I reached Temuco around 16:00 - Anita was waiting there for me with hot food on the table ... I was staving. Given that it would get dark soon and limited storage space in our garage at the moment, I decided to leave the bike in Temuco and drove back to Pucon with Anita. Our dogs were pleased to see us :-)   

Tower construction on hold for now ...

View looking north

Winter Wonderland

Winter as arrived!

Empanadas

A couple of weeks ago my mother-in-law showed me how she makes traditional Chilean empanadas. Well I decided to scale down the receipe in order to let my bread machine do all the mixing, and of-course replaced the meat filling with something Anita would find acceptable - I diced some cheese, green peppers, and onion, all bathed in some tomato purée. I'm very please with the result ... The pastry turned out perfect and the filling was tasty :-)

CH update

Finally we have a stable heating system! It turns out that our pellet boiler electronics is very sensitive to any voltage changes. The first indications of abnormal behavior was that it would frequently shut itself down and display an error message (alarm pellet) - which at first made everyone think that it was a configuration problem (52 parameters can be set on this thing).

But in the end, the problem was traced to small dips in voltage every time the water pump or refrigerator kicked in. So I fitted a domestic voltage stabilizer and that seems to have done the trick!

Oh and another leak was discovered last week; which was traced down to a drywall screw that had been driven right into the center of a 3/4" pipe! Fortunately it was fairly easy to repair, I just need to patch the drywall I cut open to expose the leak.