Tres Hermanos, Tres Leches, Tres Anos

My dear patient readers! Thank you for bearing with me the last two weeks since our return, when I left you with nothing but the temptation of two glorious photos of our 12 days in the Andes. This post will not be comprehensive, but by this point most of you have seen the slideshow of all 150 photos, and heard the highlights.

Our week and a half in Chile was the trip of a lifetime. Let me begin with the story of how the trip was conceived. When Paul and I first met, he was not a skiier. Our first winters as a dating couple, I went on an annual ski trip with friends, and his interest was only slightly piqued. The following winter, still only a bit. But in 2003, we did our first ski weekend up to Stratton and he was hooked from the beginning. Since then, he has been the ski trip cheerleader in our small family of two, and has far surpassed both my skill and my enthusiasm for the sport (I've been skiing since I was a wee girl of four!). So our skiing adventures together took us to Beaver Creek, Telluride, Park City, Stowe, and Sugarloaf. Until they took us to the Southern Hemisphere!

Our third wedding anniversary was August 28, and we knew we wanted a big trip. We contemplated Italy, where we took our honeymoon, but somehow that seemed too easy. Then the idea of Portillo, Chile, hit us... Paul had carried it in his back pocket ever since his love of skiing ignited. We booked our tickets on January 5 for a trip eight months later. The waiting was too hard to bear!

August 24 we arrived in Santiago, Chile, after a long trip that didn't live up to its hype. It was as simple as could be. We pampered ourselves at the Ritz-Carlton for a night before heading up to 10,000 feet, to Portillo. The van picked us up, and to say the least, it was a scary ride up the mountains, with the last half hour nothing but frightening switchbacks with semi-trailers threatening to slide backward and push us over the cliff! I know, I overreact. But once we arrived at Portillo for the week (like camp, where everyone arrives on the same day and leaves after a week having made friends and shared experiences), we were transported to another time and place, an experience like no other, with relaxation as our primary goal. We wondered at the awesome beauty of the Andes, with an unmatchable vista from every angle--up on the chairlift, out the dining room window, from our room, or skiing down the slopes. We ate Chilean cuisine--far too much of it!, we lounged, we skiied hard, we aimed to remember the way everything looked, smelled, and sounded, to bottle it up and take it back to Boston with us. We returned again, down the mountain (another scary ride) to Santiago for one more night before heading home. We envied even ourselves having been here and done this. We look back at our pictures with inspiration for next time.