Greetings to all our blog readers!

A glorious rainbow has just sent us back to the north.  Now, we are back home on San Juan Island after a long, long series of flights from Temuco to Santiago to Mexico City to Los Angles and finally (30 hours!) to Seattle.  We have had such varied and exciting and beautiful experiences in our 5 1/2 month exploration of Chile (and a tiny, tiny bit of Argentina).

We traveled to the farthest south that one can go by land, Cape Horn, named after a Dutch ship, the Hoorn (and not the horny looking rock as we once thought), to the highest and driest deserts in the world at the north end of Chile next to Bolivia.  We have met such wonderful and helpful and friendly people.  Our impression is that the Chileans are generally a happy people.  Yes, we know, there are exceptions, but we rarely saw them.  We also saw stunning scenery and wildlife.

When we set up this blog we created a “Best Photos” page, but we found that, in the heat of battle, so to speak, we couldn’t choose the ‘best’.  And, we still can’t.

So we are asking our readers (those who have commented via the blog pages, those who have e_mailed us over this past half-year, and those who have been ‘lurking’ without writing to us) to help us finish off this Odyssey.  We would like our readers to use the comment portion of our blog pages to tell us which photos are your top five favorites.  All we need is a sentence about your reaction to a photo and a link to the photo in question.

For example, if you happened to like the photo on this page, the one with the rainbow, you would click on the photo.  This will open the photo in your browser.  The link to the photo is in the address bar at the top of your browser.  That is the link we need to be able to understand your vote.

If you click once anywhere in the address bar the entire link will be selected.  (You can click and drag to accomplish this selection as well.)  Now hold the <Ctrl> key down and tap C  (this will copy the address).

Then use your Back button to go back to the blog post you were reading.  Then you can write a brief comment in the Leave a Reply box at the bottom of the blog page and then hold down the <Ctrl> key and tap V (this will paste the address into the comment).

If you are using Chrome or FireFox to browse the web there is a simpler way to get the link to the image.  Simply put your mouse over the photo and then hold down the right mouse button and select “Copy Image URL” ((Chrome), or “Copy Image Location” (FireFox) or “.  This makes a copy of a link to the photo.  Then you would write a brief comment in the comment box and then paste (again <Ctrl> and tap V or you can right-click in the comment section and then select Paste) the link to the photo into your message.

Finally, tap the Submit Comment button.

We will do this for the photo on this page so you can see how it should come out.

If we get enough such ‘votes’ we will compile your responses into our Best Photos category.

Thank you all very much for spending time looking at a bit of Chile through our eyes.  It is a fascinating country that we knew little about before we came for this half-year visit.

Muchas gracias y adios,

Val and Leslie