Desafios de Los Volcanoes

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Race Preparations

Heather Salzer / 29.01.2006

b>Jan 27th Team Big Bear AR arrived in Valdivia, Chile after about 30 hours of travelling, in which they crossed 5 time zones as well as changing hemispheres. The flight into Valdivia gave us a tiny look into the adventure ahead, with the snow capped volcanoes to our east and the Pacific Ocean to our west. So far the biggest change for us is the summer weather of 80 F degree and sunsets at 9:30 pm, but we are not complaining!

After arriving we spent a day unloading and reassembling our bikes from their travel boxes and hoping they survived the 3 plane changes and baggage handlers. We were able to get everything together in time to ride into town for a look at this cool Chilean town and met up with the only other American team racing, team SOLE. They kindly let us take a cruise in their kayaks, which are the same kayaks that we will be using, but that have not arrived quite yet! We hope they are with the other half of our support crew, which is also missing at the moment. But we have faith that all will come together.

We have been meeting many of the other teams, mostly the international teams because we are all staying at the same hotel. The rest of the day was spent tinkering with gear, sewing on sponsor patches and even a little bit of relaxing.

Jan 28th Today we started gear and skills checks and received the maps. We are all very anxious to begin this great adventure in what is already proving to be a beautiful country with some really fun people.See All Event Posts