Motorized Bicycles in Chile

The advances in batteries and efficiencies in electrical motors has caused lots of electrical driven vehicles from cars to scooters.   Old school would dictate a small 2-stroke engine (like from a chain saw) spewing smoke down the road grafted onto a bicycle frame.  If you want to get really fancy, a company could take it on and make it more professional.  While in Chile I saw several of these things and here are some pictures.  Pedal or spew smoke...your choice.

Graffiti or art?

We just got back from 2 weeks in Chile.  What a wonderful country Chile is.  Everyone seemed very happy and I was told by a local that Chile currently has the strongest economy for all of South America.  Don't know if that is true but the people on the streets were very happy.

Everyone has seen graffiti all over walls, garage doors or what not.  Chile is not immune from that either but the Chilean government passed some new laws that have had an impact.  The law basically classifies paintings on walls, garage doors, etc. as art.  Apparently there is different classes of offenses if you are caught putting graffiti on a blank wall or on top of art and if you do it on top of art the penalty is very steep.  This is what a local Chilean told me.  So what has happened is the emergence of art all over.  Here are some examples we saw so I ask you...graffiti or art?

Winter Wonderland

Just a few pictures taken in December.

 

Here is Hannah after a treasure hunt in the snow.  She is so proud of herself when she finds a ball buried in the snow, left behind by another dog.  This wasn't a successful day, but she still had fun.  Then we had to go home and jump in the tub so I could de-ice her.  Even with her awful schnauzer cut she doesn't mind the cold down to about -20 C, and she just adores fresh powder.

 

 

Our house early in December when I was working on my snow mountains out front.  I have become an expert snow shoveler.

The Bow River just south of Prince's Island, north of downtown.  They scraped the snow away and set up an ice rink.

Rolo doesn't cycle these days, but has a driver.  He's taken here and left to climb down the hill, ford the river, wade through the snow and ice, uphill both ways, in the wind, barefoot...

The shadows on the horizon are the mountains out west.

My big bad boy on its last ride in Europe

Europe is a great place to ride motorcycles and my big bad boy has always like to roam free.  I know there is another post of getting it into Canada and all of that is behind me now.  I just happened to come across this picture so I thought I'd post it.  And yes that is me taking off the license plate because I had to so I could turn it in to stop the Dutch government from direct drafting our account for the road tax.  Yes direct draft is the only way they do it.  I installed my old Texas plate after this picture and since then it now has a Canadian plate…eh!

Who's going to argue with this?

One of the last places we visited before leaving Europe had this place…just couldn't resist posing beside it.  In Europe the motto was "The world is going to end, the boat is going to sink and the platform was visiting the abyss of hell" and I guess I might have been at the center of everything.  I'm sure some of the people in the office might have thought this...

A spelling lesson

The other morning while walking Hannah in the park, we saw this.

Didn't realize that we were spelling ''eh'' incorrectly, but now we know.

Lots of frost that morning too - may have snow this weekend.

Canadian Wine Tour

The locals told us we needed to visit the Okanagan Valley in British Columbia in  order to try Canadian wines.  They said it was only an 8 hour drive through the mountains so we thought we would take a quick trip on one of Rolo's three day weekends.  Now that we are back in North America, he gets those every other week again.  So we went last weekend.

Well, it wasn't exactly 8 hours...  With all the rush to finish road construction projects before the winter starts, there were quite a few slow downs in the mountains, and we hit the only large city in our path right at Friday afternoon rush hour, so it was a 10 1/2 hour drive to get there on Friday.  But it was a beautiful drive through the mountains, and we had the opportunity to see lots of new stuff.

We stayed at a little hotel on the beach of Lake Okanagan, and found out from the owners that was their last weekend open before closing for the winter.  It wasn't very busy.  Saturday, we visited several wineries and were able to find some nice ones to bring home including ice wine, and port style wines for Rolo.

We took Hannah with us on the trip - she didn't find the wine tasting interesting, but she did enjoy chasing the Canadian geese off the beach back onto the lake.  In fact I think she really enjoyed the lake - kind of like her days in the canals.  Of course she smelled much better afterwards.

The drive home was much quicker on Sunday since all the construction sites were idle.  I think we might go back, but plan to take a few more days.  I'm still not adjusted back to those long distances and drives in the car.  But it's great to have a nice comfortable car to drive here.