We landed in Chile at 7 am (3 am our time). We were exhausted and ornery. Eli slept about an hour the entire flight and he was fussy and wouldn’t eat. Poor little guy.

Getting our rental car was another ordeal. Our tiny bit of Spanish and the clerk’s tiny bit of English didn’t match up amazing, but we finally figured it out. The next problem: they were out of GPS. We didn’t have chips for our phones, so we had no GPS that way to get us to San Alfonso Del Mar. We were told that any gas station would have them, so we stopped at the first 4 out of the airport to find one. But to no avail. At least Brandon found us some ice cream bars to cool us off!

We drove another 20 minutes or so before Brandon and I were both so tired. We pulled off to rest stop and slept in the car for a few hours.

Continuing on anyway using road signs (go figure!) we ended up Algoborro. I spotted a Lider (sort of a Walmart here) where we stopped for groceries and bingo! They had chip cards. We loaded up our cards and were on our way to San Alfonso Del Mar.

Our lack of Spanish continued to make checking into our hotel and finding the right building and parking lot difficult, but somehow it worked out!

The sunshine and sea were a welcome sight, but we were all still a bit grumpy. I took the older 3 out to swim while Brandon and Eli napped, but the pools were freezing! So we didn’t last long.

This was how happy everyone was that first night at dinner. Ha!

But then Blake lost his tooth he had been wiggling all day (see above photo of him in the pool)! So that was exciting.

He placed in tooth under his pillow and the Chilean tooth fairy came! He was thrilled.

We were glad to have that first day behind us. Thankfully, we know from experience that the first day is always rough on everyone, so we kept our expectations very low.