Ohhh what an adventure today has been. Today we said good bye to half of our travel group and Fred, Rick and I took off towards Mendoza, Argentina. We had planned on spending three days in Mendoza to explore a new city and try a new wine region. We left around noon from Santiago and headed north east up to cross the Andes Mountains. We drove through some beautiful small towns along our drive before starting to climb up the Andes Mountains. We decided to cross at a place called Portillo. Portillo is a Ski Resort in the winter, but right now it just looked like a big pile of rocks and it is not like any ski resort we have in Utah. I am sure they get a lot of snow, they should at 13,000 feet. We climbed numerous switch backs on our way up the mountain.

We finally arrived at the smallest border crossing I had ever seen. It was a combination of a few old and when I say old, I mean REALLY old buildings. we pulled up to a window and spoke to an old gentleman and he asked us for our papers and where we were headed. We told him we were headed to Mendoza and handed over all of the papers we had for the rental car. After he looked through everything he shook his head and said that our car didn’t have a VISA to go to Argentina and we couldn’t continue. I pleaded with him to let us pass and finally said I had to go speak with the boss of the border crossing, so we pulled over to the side and went into this old ramble shack to find out if we could cross over.

I called Hertz International and they confirmed our itinerary and that we had authorization to go from Santiago, Chile over the Andes to Mendoza, Argentina. They said we just needed to contact the local Hertz store in Santiago and have them provide us the correct papers. I called the local Hertz store in Santiago, but of course it was Sunday and no one could help us. The paper that we needed had to be notarized. The Chileans love to have papers notarized here. I always see people standing in line at places of Notary. The lady informed us that we would have to return to Santiago and then take the paperwork to be Notarized on Monday and it might take until Tuesday to confirm. That is not what I wanted to hear. I am stubborn and so for an hour I tried every possible way we could think that would allow us to cross the border. We finally admitted that they were not going to allow the car across the border. They said we could leave it up there and talk to one of the many tourist busses that crossed occasionally and see if they would take us with them to Mendoza. We honestly thought about it … but decided to return to Santiago.

So we will stay here in Santiago for the next three days and then just drink wine and visit the wineries here in Chile. Sometimes you just have to go with the flow even when you don’t want to. This is something that I have a VERY hard time with.