We traveled home today with Sarah and her mom. Sarah's been our science and math teacher for the past 10 months. It was great that her mom was able to visit and see how Sarah's been living these months.
Dark, looming clouds chased us and by the time we were in Villarrica it was raining cars and dogs. Rain always makes travelling on the dirt-turned-mud roads an adventure. This day was no different. After sloshing and fishtailing more times than I can count, we made it to the “bridge” at the end of our town. It was under water! If you saw what our “bridges” look like here, you’d know why I put that word in quotes. Our “bridges” are accidents waiting to happen. Some are made of wooden planks with missing boards. When those fall to pieces, a detour is made with piled up dirt. This has been the case in our town for months now. As you can imagine, when it rains, the dirt detour washes away. We have been stuck in town several times due to washed out passes but this is was the first time to be stuck outside of town.
We saw a
couple motorcyclists walking their motos across the underwater bridge. The water was up to their thighs. Jeff donned his boots and poncho and waded
onto to bridge with his shove to test the edges. He came back and said we needed to turn back
and take the detour route. We hadn’t
been the back way before. Thankfully
Tyler and Micah had biked that trail just last month and remember a large
percentage of the way. I was impressed. There were so many turns. We were on trails just wide enough for our
van with steep muddy embankments on either side at times. I wanted to get pictures of where we were but
it was pitch dark.
On the two occasions
Tyler and Micah couldn’t remember the way, we chose wrongly and ended up having
to turn around. The paths being so
narrow that even after the trailer was unhitched, it was still a 20-point
turn. The detour added 1 ½ hours to our
trip.
Nine hours after leaving
Asuncion, we arrived home.
