Time to leave

It’s 11:30 at night, and already Orion has cleared the trees behind the house and is well on his way to the upright position – sign of fall marching on towards winter.

The snow lasted through the week, only to melt in one glorious, mild and sunny day the following Saturday. It gave me time to clean up the last flower pots and flower beds, put the tools away and cover the lemon balm with spruce boughs in the hope that it might survive its third winter. 

I woke up on Sunday to grey skies with clouds almost touching the ground, a typical November day by German standards if not by ours. It didn’t take long for the drizzle to change to snow, and by late afternoon the ground was white once again, with total accumulations of about ten centimetres again. Still, it is by far not as cold as it could be; most days the temperatures still hover around the freezing mark. 

The birds found the feeder in no time at all, and I have been enjoying the busy comings and goings of chickadees, blue jays, downy and hairy woodpeckers and, to my great delight, even a flock of pine grosbeaks. They must have decided to check out the alternate food source, since I have watched them hanging from spruce cones in the trees around the yard, making lots of noise when they move from one to the other.

As much as I enjoy the quieter world of late fall, the darkening days with opportunity to do things inside, the time has come again to leave it all behind for the southern hemisphere. Tomorrow at this time we will be on a plane from Toronto to Santiago, and for the next month we’ll embark on another South American adventure. We plan to explore parts of Chile, northern Argentina and Bolivia, and this time we will not stray from our plan to visit the Salar de Uyuni, the world’s largest salt flat right across the Chilean border in Bolivia. We had thought about going there two years ago already, but I felt a strong need for lush and green then after travelling through arid country for quite some time, and we went to the Bolivian pampa instead.

Other than that our plans will unfold as we go. I booked a hostel in Santiago for the first night, but we will likely move on from there on the next day already.

I plan to keep my travel blog updated when time and internet allow for it. Here is the link:  

Every day is a journey