South American Adventure - Days 1-3
Day 1 – Saturday February 27, 2010: “Getting There is Half the Fun!” Our grand trip to South America was almost over before it began. Just after midnight on February 27th, our departure date, we received a phone call from Peter Johnson in Los Angeles telling us that a massive earthquake had hit Chile, our first destination. A few hours of fitful sleep were ended by a phone call at 4:15AM from Mike Giles telling us how bad the quake was (8.8 on the Richter scale) and to watch CNN. Since we were going to get up at 4:45 anyway (for a 5:30 departure to the airport), we watched the news cycles and saw the devastation that had occurred. The epicenter of the quake was closest to Concepcion, Chile’s second-largest city. They were reporting several hundred deaths and a good deal of destruction there. There were pictures of collapsed highways, buried houses, and the misery that goes hand-in-hand with natural disasters. The capital city of Santiago, 200 miles north, was also affected, though not ...