A Long and Winding Road

12 Aug Today was a long day. We left after sunrise and drove through the Desierto de Atacama. It is the highest, driest desert in the world. For miles all we saw were distant mountains on each side of the road, with sand, rocks and no vegetation. There is a lot of mining activity in the eastern mountains, which consequently brings a lot of heavy equipment and Crystal beer trucks. It's a good thing our gas tank is large, because from the time we left until 3 in the afternoon, we did not see a gas station. The distance, coupled with the high cost of gas, is probably why there are very few individual cars and a lot of cross country buses. I thought we were going to stop in Copiapo, but it was still early and we had a divided four lane highway, so on he drove. The interstate like highway stopped at Vallenar, and that's where the ongoing construction started. Roger had an almost full tank of gas, so decided to go as far the end of construction. We never did find the end of construction and ended up driving after dark, because we never came across a place where we could stop. There's a whole lot of nothing in the western foothills of the Chilean Andes. We made it to La Serena on the coast again, and stopped for the night. Roger was exhausted from driving. I am exhausted from watching him drive. We did come across an interesting section between Copiapo and Vallener. There's a native flower that blooms magenta, and covered several of the lower foothills that we passed by. There were also some light blue wildflowers as well, but they didn't change the land color significantly like the magenta flowers, which were very low to the ground. We've got some research to do tonight to figure out our game plan for Santiago. Santiago is less than 600 km away, so we'll get there tomorrow. The RV definitely needs a washing, before we take it to any dealership, as well as some re-organizing. We found out today that there are no car washes in Northern Chile, because water is too expensive to waste on washing the car. Sounds like San Antonio to us.