8 Feb: SEA (US) --> DFW (US) --> "Equator".

Welcome to Marc and Jill's #patagoniacaminada!

This trip has been a few months in the making and it's good to be off! Marc and I are travelling to South America for a bit, focusing on Argentina and Chile. I have been to some of the areas that we are covering on this trip (December, 1998). As for Marc, it is his first trip to South America.

I should be sleeping but it has been a pretty choppy flight. Normally I snooze through this kind of thing but I feel like we are being thrown into a wash cycle every 20 minutes or so since we left U.S. airspace.

Right now, we are on leg #2 of 4 to get to our initial destination: The Atacama Desert. You can probably surmise from the name that it is one of the driest places on the planet. It is located in Chile and is situated between the Pacific Ocean and the Andes mountain range. As we see the sites, we will blog more about the specifics of the region.

Other places that we plan to cover on this trip include Buenos Aires, Tierra del Fuego, Southern Patagonia, Santiago and finally, Mendoza. The last place is in Argentina and is very popular wine region and is known for Malbec. We are looking forward to learning more about how wines are crafted in this corner of the world. Chile is also emerging as a premier wine producer, so as we did on the Australian Walkabout, we look forward to educating ourselves on this area.

By the time we get to our hotel in San Pedro de Atacama, we will have been travelling for 25+ hours. Bottom-line: South America, particularly Chile and Argentina, is a really long ways away from the U.S., let alone Seattle. In case you're wondering, I put the end point for today's activities at the Equator since it was around midnight Seattle time when we crossed it. I know, the picture could be better. As I said earlier, it was a turbulent flight from DFW to SCH.

Feel free to chime in with questions or comments as we progress through our latest adventure!