Viña del Mar

The kids looking out at the bay from our hotel balcony.

We woke up Monday morning in Kurt and Ashley Avarell's apartment. As you probably know, they let us crash there while they went out to Viña del Mar using our timeshare - a win-win trade. Unfortunately, the internet out there was too slow for him to be able to do his work, so he had to come back for his phone calls on Tuesday. So we all agreed for them to come back to their home and we'd go spend a day in Viña del Mar. We originally didn't go there cause the timeshare only had a 1 bedroom available, and whereas Kurt and his wife have two kids, it worked for them. We didn't want to be naughty and squeeze 9 people into a 1 bedroom, but left with no other options when the internet didn't work for Kurt, we decided to go anyway.

So Monday morning, I packed up all our belonging again, only thankful I didn't have to worrying this time about weight distribution among the bins or having things tightly packed. We took a change of clothes and swimsuits for Viña, then left the rest in the Avarell's office room.

Corey stayed in their apartment to work until they arrived to give them their keys, and the kids and I headed out into the city to walk two blocks to the city park that we'd heard was awesome. Unfortunately, after we got there and saw no people in it and all the gates closed, we learned that it is always closed on Mondays for maintenance. Fortunately, we would have probably had to find that out by accident eventually, so we're thankful we got that learned on our first Monday in Chile. So we walked around the park in an attempt to walk to the mall, but I was just so turned around - I have no point of reference here - all the buildings are big and look alike and I just don't know which way is north, so we just stayed put and waited for Corey to be done. He picked us up, and with Google maps on the cell phone in hand, we were off to Viña.

It was a lovely drive - lots of grapes growing for the wineries that Chile is famous for.

The kids all got a good nap

We're almost there...

We see the ocean again! Hello to the Pacific, but the water is freezing down here in Chile.


We had a beautiful view of the bay from our room at the Hippocampus Resort - ocean breeze!

The kids watched some TV while I unpacked a little

Lucky kids - they get to watch the same shows that were on in Costa Rica. TV makes everywhere feel like home.

Hyrum and I went exploring for a while

Corey, the man who makes it all possible. Here he is out in the lobby where he could pick up a pretty good signal.

The kids loved the play room, and wanted to spend most of their waking hours there - I didn't mind.
Fun slide and toys to play with, crafts to do, kids to play with. That was good cause they met lots of outgoing Spanish speaking kids - these girls were all so cute with Lily, Abi, and Wesley.


Fun fun! They got to color worry free since it wasn't our room and it wasn't any problem to accidentally draw on the table.

At night time, we gave the kids the bedroom with it's two twin bed's pushed together. Corey and I got the couch.
I guess they all thought the bed was really crowded, cause the kids were fighting over who got to sleep in Lily's play pen with her.

Melodie won - we decided to make it a birthday privilege. :)