Torres Del Paine

We flew from Santiago down to Punta Arenas, Chile. We originally booked a hotel room in this town but as we were getting off the plane, all of us almost fell over from the giant gust of wind. It was 50 degrees but felt like 20 degrees because the of the wind coming off the Antarctic ocean. This town has a boardwalk that parallels the Magellan Strait. Super cool - literally, super freezing cold! We decided to high tail it North to see if it got any warmer. We headed towards Puerto Natales about a 2-3 hour drive North of where we landed. Once we finally got to Puerto Natales, we drove around the cute town and decided to stay here for the night. We had to stop at several different hotels to finally find a spot to crash. Once we checked in, we took a nice, long walk into town. The next day we had around a 2 hour drive to Torres Del Paine. This park was unbelievable! We booked a hotel in the Rio Serreno Valley and the first day we took a nice, easy hike along the river. The next morning, we woke up and asked Nash to open the blinds. When he did, we had the most amazing view of the Patagonia mountains! After breakfast we decided to head into the park and do a hike. We started at the base of a waterfall and then hiked about 4 miles roundtrip to a beautiful view of the peaks of Patagonia. After our hike, I made peanut butter and jelly sandwiches in the back of the car and then we took off towards Grey Lake. Nash took a nice long nap and woke up right when we were getting to Grey Lake Lodge. At the Lodge we had to check in at 3 pm for our 4'oclock boat tour to the glacier. After Paul checked us all in and got our tickets, we had to hike about 40 minutes to get to the boat. The hike wasn't hard but it wasn't easy either. We had to traverse through gravel and moving rocks with a view of a giant iceberg. It was incredible. Once on board, we listened to the safety briefing and then were on our way to visit some amazing glaciers. On the way back, the boat made a stop to drop off and pick off passangers that have been hiking for 4/5/6 days along the glaciers. Once we got back to the drop off location, we still had the 40-50 minute hike back out to our car. The boys saw a small ice berg and decided it would be a lot of fun to destroy it by throwing rocks at it. This was actually really fun and we ended up playing around the iceberg area for around an hour. Once we finally made it back, we were the last car in the parking lot. We started our drive from the parking lot through the park back to our hotel. We knew this was around an hour drive with no cell phone service at it was around 7:30 pm. We assumed the boys would fall asleep on this drive but they were so excited about this amazing day, they couldn't fall asleep. Once we were almost to the park gate, we notice several cars were pulled over on the side of the road. We couldn't tell what the cars were doing and we saw a few people with binoculars. We stopped and looked around for a bit and still were unsure what was happening. As we slowly passed the car in front of us, Paul suddenly spotted the puma sitting in the tall grass to the left of us. We stopped our car, put on our flashers and got on top of the car to get a better view. The puma seemed to be stalking a group of horses but the horses just galloped on past the cat without so much of a glimpse of fear. At this pont, we were completely unsure of what the puma was doing. Then the beautiful creature decided to cross the road a few cars in front of us. Paul used his African safari knowledge and drove ahead and waited for the puma to come to us. We got the most amazing view of the puma walking along the gully directly beside us. We kept telling the kids to stay in the car and be quiet. We did not expect to see such amazing wildlife here! What a day we had!!!! Unbelievable!