A story of three Coloradan girls....

Most people from Colorado when asked what comes to their mind when they think of Chile is.... The Andes! I was constantly asked before I left to come to this amazing place if I was going to ski! Well guess what guys? I went skiing in the Andes with my two good girlfriends! All being from Colorado and loving to ski, we made a mission to find snow and mountains that we love so much!

Jeannie (my roommate here in my host house) is from Castle Rock, Colorado. After our adventure to the mountains we now call her Mama Jean because she put everything together.... transportation, rentals, and passes! Amelie (yes she spells her name the same as me but pronounces it Am-elee like Amy) is from the greater Denver area and we have so much fun introducing ourselves together because 1. we have basically the same name (in both of our three names we have five letters different. She's Amelie Elisabeth Lanning and I'm Amelie Elizabeth Kastning!) 2. we look a lot alike with freckles, short body, and short hair and 3. We love basically everything the same! Someone would probably say we're twins! Jeannie, Amelie and I all attend Colorado State University and have so much in common and guess what that includes... Love for Snow and skiing in the snow!!!

Now for our adventure.... The three of us started out from Jeannie and I's house at 4:30 in the morning, after an all hands in cheer of "Go Team," for our bus to Santiago. We were nervous because this was literally our first adventure out on our own with no program to show us where to go and what to do when we finally get to our destination. The three of us made it to Santiago, trying to be as wide awake as possible because Santiago is dangerous on the subway. We were on the subway for 3o minutes going from one side of Santiago to the other in search of our next stop the shop Ski Total. There we would buy our tickets, get our wonderful gear, and find our transportation up to the mountain. We found the shop and it was a mad house in there because the company can take you to any of the major ski resorts in Chile! After about 45 minutes of scrambling to get everything as fast as we could and being sort of yelled at by our driver for looking like we were just standing around when everyone else was in the van waiting to go.... we were on our way to the resort Valle Nevado which is one of the bigger resorts in Chile!

As a side note the drivers here in Chile especially the bus drivers are crazy and I feel like I'm going to die every time I get in a bus! The ride up to the resort was crazy! We made friends with our driver by saying sorry for making him late, giving him a cookie (at 8 in the morning), and a piece of gum! He was a very nice man who talked with Jeannie and I because we were put up front with him. He told us all about Valle Nevado and the drive there which is an hour and a half from the ski shop, on basically a one lane road, and consists of going up 40 yes 40 switch backs!! Usually people get very sick with the ride, but we all made it there in one piece! Pulling up to Valle Nevado was an amazing sight! These mountains are to die for and the three of us just wanted to pool our money and go heliskiing! To bad we don't have a couple thousand laying around for that!

Finally we got to ski! The feeling of being at the ocean early in the morning to skiing on snow at 10:30 am was incredible! I think only in Chile that can happen! Being adventurous girls we found some good powder to skim through! However there was also a lot of crusty snow from melting and then freezing with powder on top so it was hard to ski it in rental gear! But we had a blast non the less! We had adventures of skiing over to other resorts and finding out we had to hike back to Valle Nevado! I can officially say now that I've climbed an Andes mountain! We had to hitch up our pants and be real Coloradan girls and climb all the way back up to where we were before! This happened to us TWICE!! But we laughed about it in the end and I think it made our day that much better!

To finish our awesome adventure we got a few Heinekins and just relaxed looking at the beautiful mountains surrounding us! It was one hell of a day and I'm so proud of us girls getting the "cajones" to get out there and find our mountains! Well we found them!!!

We made a video about our crazy adventure and there are also pictures on facebook that I've been tagged in so check them out! I'm attaching the video to this post for everyone to view so I hope it works! Chao Chao!