25 Feb: Parque Nacional Torres Del Paine (CHI).

The good news is that Marc was feeling good after yesterday's hike. But he didn't want to push his luck, so he opted out of today's hike. I put him "to work" writing out some postcards and getting a bunch of our photos uploaded to Dropbox since we finally had a decent WiFi connection in our hotel. What a good sport! Below is the view from our hotel room.... not bad, eh?

Last night, the group unanimously decided to take it "easy" and not get up early to catch a ferry to hike in one of the valleys in the park. Since joining the tour, we had hiked almost 100 miles and we were pretty beat, plus the ferry schedule extends the day even more.

Claudio and Muti, our guides, picked out a new route for us to hike to that gave us a great view of the Paine Massif, the Paine Horns and a really pretty waterfall. The weather was partly cloudy but we still had some nice glimpses from Cerro Condor and also saw some condors (fancy that!).

We headed back to the hotel and found Marc chilling out while enjoying the view from lunch. Everyone is starting to think about their next adventure, so different ideas and suggestions were tossed around by the group. Marc and I are probably the least travelled of the bunch, which says a lot about how much our group has travelled around the globe!

I spent the rest of the afternoon and early evening finishing my latest read "Business Adventures" by John Cook. I was looking for books to read so I decided to see some of the latest recos from Bill Gates and it was on it. Some of the stories are pretty interesting and many are from the 60s/70s, yet it is amazing how history seems to repeat itself.

Our gang splits up after Friday and we have really enjoyed getting to know these folks. They have all been low drama and fun to be around. Everyone just naturally has offered to share or help when someone forgot something at home, etc. Marc and I are the youngest by a wide margin, but we have been blown away by the fitness levels of our fellow mates. Actually their fitness probably tops most Americans, forget about people in their age bracket (veteran members of AARP). It's inspiring (their fitness) and sad (the general lack of physicall fitness of many Americans).

The group reconvened to talk about the activities for tomorrow and we voted to spend more time in a town called Puerto Natales, which is supposed to be pretty and surrounded by the Andes and water. The weather forecast continues to look good, so hopefully that works out for us.