Tranquilo, tranquilO!

the zona franca in punta arenas

Our guide showed up at 8:30 last night - "the Indian" was still preparing his offer and would have it for us by 10:00 am this morning. Rodrigo's buddy also had the name of someone else who was very interested in the car and was supposed to call him before our 10:00 am pow wow.

By this point we had spent enough time trying to sell the car and we had decided to take the best offer we got this morning and call it a day.

We drove out to see Rodrigo's friend - the Indian was offering exactly the same price as our lowball offer yesterday! Done deal...

We were told to come back before 5:00 pm, when we would sign all the paperwork and get our money.

Now it was time to see whether we could come home a bit early - our flights weren't scheduled to leave until Feb. 3, 8 days away, and we were close to finished with the trip.

First call went to my wife, and negotiator extrordinaire, Anne. She worked her magic and found us flights home departing early on Thursday morning, one and a half days away! That would kill our trip to Puerto Williams, but we both decided it was time to get back to our families, so we took the flights for the 28th.

That meant we quickly had to change our flight from Punta Arenas to Santiago - a 3 block stroll away, and we were in the offices of Sky Airlines, making the change allowing us to leave tomorrow afternoon!

After a short afternoon nap, we headed out to the Zona Franca and said what we though were our final goodbyes to Manuel - however, when I went to see the manager of the dealership, he explained the paperwork wasn't quite ready, but would be soon (tonight, possibly tomorrow). This makes us a little uneasy, as we have to make sure everything is wrapped up here by lunchtime, so we can leave! Back to the hotel, with Manuel in tow!

We will enjoy our last night with a trip to the World famous Shackleton Bar, find a great steak and some fine wine, and best of all, do all of this with great company - it's amazing that we haven't killed each other yet (in fact, just the opposite)!

We hoped to spend our last day of the trip visiting the Otway Penguin Colony north of town in the morning, and then head to the airport in the afternoon for our flight to Santiago, but now that our car sale is not complete, we may just have to hang around town for the day! I hope to publish our final blog post of our trip tomorrow night from the Santiago Airport and then will follow up with a recap over the weekend.