Reconnecting with my high school nerd self

You can tell from the intermittence of posts that we are in the midst of the trip. At the beginning of the trip, I am excited because all is new and I want to post a lot. I anticipate that at the end of the trip I will depressed and will want to write lots of posts so that I can remember the trip, but right now? Well, I should probably be writing more.
So here is the summary:
We stayed a week in Mendoza, Argentina with a childhood friend of mine. Kevin and I were quite tight from 7th grade up to 12th grade. In 1984, when I returned from a year abroad in 6th grade in Holland, I had missed the key social group formation that happens in the first year of middle school. That, and living in Holland had changed my perspective on things a little bit. For whatever reason, Kevin was kind enough to show me the ropes of middle school and we became very close friends. We both excelled in computers and we were drawn to the Commodore Pet 32 computers that they had at school.
As you can probably guess, this accelerated us into the cool group at school and we couldn't keep the ladies off of us. That, and being good at wood shop really had us running the school. We pretty much stayed nerds for the rest of our school careers. I remained sub 100 pounds until my junior year in high school which didn't help any either.
Even though High School kind of sucked for me, I do believe that being somewhat of an outsider has made me who I today and Kevin was a big part of forming that person.
I hadn't seen him in about ten years and was looking forward to hanging out with his family (Belen and his 2 year old daughter Chloe) in the wine capital of Argentina.

Upon arriving at Kevin's he showed us to our room and then we quickly adjusted to the Argentinian way of life. This involves drinking beer and wine, eating dinner at midnight and sleeping in quite late the next day. Not so bad, really.
We BBQ'd, we toured the area a bit, and we got reacquainted. When they had to work, Megan and I visited wineries and went up into the mountains to explore. The mountains in the area are enormous and come straight out of the valley. They form a 15000 foot wall and the canyons that go into them are amazing. It is a nice area and one I could see going back to for sure.
It was a pleasure to hang out with the family and somewhat scary and exciting to hang out with a two year old for so long. She is incredibly cute and fun to watch, but she is also a lot of work and needs constant attention. Kevin and Belen do a fantastic job juggling their personal lives with Chloe and it makes me nervous to consider having one of these of our own. But it'll be ok, right?
Having a deadline to be in Santiago by friday afternoon, we packed up our bikes on Thursday "morning" (which was really 1 o'clock) and headed for Chile.

The road climbed up through an incredible deep and dry canyon which can only be the Andes. We experienced some serious wind and passed 100's of Harley Davidson Motorcycles coming the other direction from Chile. From what I can gather, there was a rally in Mendoza and people in Chile own a lot of Harley's. It might have been fun to go, but we needed to be in Santiago.

[You can see the wind in this video blowing me over] We drove past Aconcagua national park (the highest peak in the Americas) but the snow clouds obscured our view of the giant. We did see some glaciers and some beautiful countryside. All the limitless valleys and peaks kept me looking around and wondering what it might be like to explore all of these places.

[at the border] The border crossing was pretty easy since both the Argentine and the Chilean border officials were in the same building. We dropped down to Los Andes and found an (expensive) room for the night. There was a rodeo in town so everything was booked and besides, Chile is just expensive.
We made the final 100km to Santiago and located the mechanic that I had read about on HorizonsUnlimited.com.
[the human rights museum in Santiago] We dropped of the bikes at this Chilean born, german motorcycle enthusiast and hoped for the best (for both our bikes and our pocket books). My steering head bearing went out again and megan's are starting to go. Because we need parking for the bikes for the next week, we also had him change the oil.
We enjoyed 2 days in Santiago, a very clean and modern city with US like prices on everything. I went for runs in the morning and then we walked around seeing the sites.\
Then, on Sunday afternoon, we took a taxi to the airport and boarded a plane for Chicago.