A little trip south

Forecast that day was for partly cloudy. But, it looked like it would end up mostly. In the pics ahead you will see we spent most of the day in a light rain, but it was beautiful.

By the way, thanks for coming back. I haven't been very good at posting on a regular basis because it doesn't seem to me that we have anything real interesting happen very often. We couldn't travel much because our transportation was a bit sketchy. But, when our neighbor headed to the states to look for a new house in preparation for his transfer to Florida, they told us to drive his car. So now with wheels, we headed south to Talca.

East of Talca in the foothills of the Andes we came upon a beautiful little lake called Lago Colbun. With the mist in the air and the beautiful spring folage we had some great views.







































If you have followed this blog from the beginning you will remember my great desire to take advantage of one of the many natural hot springs in Chile. Well, we call them hot springs in the states, but here they are called termas, which cognates with thermal. Now termas doesn't mean hot. It just means that it is not as cold as surface water running in the creeks and rivers. Many of the termas have water that is in the 70 to 80 degrees F range. Nothing that gets a hot spring enthusiast to take off his clothes. But, in the area of Talca I found one that had promise. They posted a pool at 40 degrees C which is 104 F. That is doable. So we paid it a visit.


A beautiful setting and some nice grounds.


















The pools were ok, but didn't look real spectacular, but for some hot water I could close my eyes.




Then the disappointment. In order to use the pools you had to buy a package deal. The package included a room for the night and meals for the day. As I remember it was about 150,000 pesos for a couple. That comes to $214.23 and we didn't bring clothes or girl stuff to stay overnight. We had swim suits, flipflops and towels. No bueno!!!!

We continued on our trip and visited a cute little town called Villa Alegre. A very typical old Chilean village. You saw some of the pictures in my last Spanish lesson post. We are falling in love with the colorful houses and buildings. This was indeed a Kodak location.


Certainly the horse and cart are worth a picture, but notice the white flowers in the field over the fence.





Kind of an interesting phenomenon we have noticed here. There are many row crops that are harvested by hand - perhaps strawberries or grapes or potatoes. Whatever it is, at the end of each row of crops there is a beautiful stand of flowers. Perhaps it is to brighten the day of the field worker.




An appropriate statue given the surrounding foliage.

This should be named Rainbow Street.






















































We finished with Villa Allegre and headed for Talca. There we visited with the family of one of our mangers from the farm. His family is moving to the farm in December when school is out. We had a great day seeing this amazing country. It is different from home in many ways, but it is basically good people going through life doing the best they can, just like home.