26-Jan-2010 10315 Miles

Coquimbo, Peru. We have made lots of miles the last few days. We are just enjoying watching the scenary roll by in Chile. We have had some interesting things happen over the last couple of days.

I am kinda wondering if we look like a couple of little lost children sometimes, because someone seems to find us at the times we could use some help and gives us the solution. Yesterday was such a day. Nick's tires are in bad shape. We thought we could make it to Santiago where we managed to locate some tires for his bike. But when his rear tire started to come apart it was failing quickly. Big changes by the mile, not by the day anymore, and we had 1000 miles of desert to get to Santiago. Well this guy, Antonio, stops and looks at Nick's rear tire as we are getting a coke after fueling up. He says he has a solution, so we follow him to his shop, where he has half a dozen, slightly used tires for Nick's bike. Amazing. As we are taking the wheel off we notice that his brakes are gone. Now these are the brake pads we just replaced in Bogata, no bueno. 4000 miles and they are shot, tearing up the disc, not good. We have no parts. In my world that would mean waiting for parts, but in Antonio's world, not so. He is going to heat up and remove pads from some other brakes, grind them to match the plates from Nick's brakes and bond them to those steel plates. 6 hours later and we are on the road again. We had ridden about 100 miles before we met up with Antonio. It was late, about 6:30 and we both felt like riding so we just rode and rode through the Atacama Desert, the driest place on earth, till about midnight. We ended up putting 400 miles on that day and ended up in Chanaral. As we rolled into town my bike logged 10,000 miles on this journey.

Then today, we met a guy and his girlfriend from Santiago. He started making phone calls for us and located a front tire for us there, so now all we have to do is go get it.

Like I said, I think we must look like a couple of lost little children sometimes. These people seem to find us when we need them. I can't say enough about the friendliness of the people here in Chile. Everywhere we go the people are so nice.

And I guess we got out of Peru just in time. Deanna emailed me a line like that and I didn't know what she was talking about until I checked the news. Wow, I guess we did. All those places covered with water and mud looked very familiar.