Good bye Chile

We left Los Alamos blithely enough, as if we’d be back before twenty four hours was up. Indeed, that’s what we subconsciously expected, despite knowing with our heads how wrong we were.
 

Hermano George walked over in the early morning mist to say farewell.

Karla and Camilla got up early to make these for their Dad's car. We explained to them what our name means in English, and they thought they'd play around with it a little! It made us laugh.

Because they don't have 'th' in Spanish, this is how many people wrote 'Thanks'. 

Gloria was standing on the road in the next town to Los Alamos holding the Chileno flag, to see us off in style.

The weather wasn't happy.

Some of our friends took time off uni and work in the city to see us off in the airport.

...and some people who couldn't make it called us instead.

Aaah!

After we walked through security they went outside and found a place where they could see us in the plane.

Sitting in the plane as it moved faster and faster away, watching our friends dwindle into dots and then disappear was hard – but they didn’t leave us alone for long! Before we were in Santiago more than five minutes we had a phone call from Mr Franko. They’d conned Dad into keeping his mobile, and someone or other of our friends called every hour of our five hour wait for our next flight. Like Madd commented, ‘It doesn’t matter how far away we travel, they aren’t going to let us go now!’.

Funnily enough, perhaps unbelievably, Mr Franko managed to call us when we were in the Canadian airport of Toronto. How he managed to reach us when our phones only serve the Chilean area is your guess as well as anyone’s!