We came rolling in hot this past Sunday morning from our 2019 South American Spring Break adventure. (I’m not going to lie; that 2:03 a.m. flight out of Lima is pretty brutal.)

How on earth did we end up going to Chile and Peru? Well, we did a little math and came up with a number: 4. That’s how many Spring Breaks we had left before Jack graduates from high school. Yikes. Time to up the ante on the family traveling game.

We plugged in our dates to the Hopper app (again, I highly recommend this, if for no other reason than just to see how much it would set you back (both in dollars and in hours) to fly to, say, Timbuktu or Tahiti) and quickly realized that we were not going to score $400 flights to Paris again. The best price options were all heading south. After a serious debate between Santiago and Buenos Aires, we opted for Chile.

Hopper being Hopper, it wants you to get the most bang for your buck (read: Hopper ain’t a fan of the direct flight. For instance, last year he–I’m assuming Hopper’s a he because of all the connecting flight nonsense–wanted to send us to Paris via Istanbul.). Flying to Santiago through Lima was $500 cheaper than flying to Santiago directly from Atlanta. A little more math: that would leave roughly $2500 still in our pocket, we have 4 Spring Breaks left with all sons under one roof, and we could also quickly see a bit of another country (added bonus: Lima is on the way to Santiago; no backtracking). Through Lima it was then.

We snuck off from Atlanta on Thursday, a day before Spring Break officially began, and I am happy to say that we ran into several other families we knew who were doing the same thing. Travel is educational, people.

The roughly 7 hour flight put us getting in to Lima at 12:35 a.m., and our connection on to Santiago was set to leave at 2:01 a.m. which is cutting it pretty doggone close, especially when you and 4 traveling companions have to go through customs and change planes. Miraculously, we made it on time, and the zombie plane down to Chile was perfectly uneventful.

Getting through customs in Santiago wasn’t technically difficult; the line was slow moving, and we were exhausted, but by 9 a.m. we were outside the airport waiting on a ride to our apartment.

Our go-to for international travel is to rent a place through Air B&B or VRBO. After much research to determine the safest neighborhoods, I stumbled upon Casas del Cerros near the Costanera Center. While the original apartment we’d rented wasn’t ready for us due to a late departure by the previous renters, the host (Mabel) immediately put us in a smaller apartment two doors down for the day with the assurance that our original place would be ready by 8:00 that night. This was an awful lot of rapidly spoken Spanish to navigate right out of the gate and with very little sleep, but I managed to piece it all together and explain to the family before crashing on a bed in the lowest level of the apartment.

After a rest and a wash-up, we needed vittles big time, so we took the path of least resistance and headed over to the Costanera Center–a monster of a shopping complex underneath the Gran Torre de Santiago. (Little did I know this would be the first of many visits to this place.)

Jet lag is best fought with fresh air, so after lunch we walked over to the Providencia Teleferico to catch the gondola to the top of Cerro San Cristobal.

 We rode the gondola halfway up the hill, hopped out for a quick look around and then hopped back on to ride to the very top for panoramic views of Santiago at the foot of the giant statue of La Virgen.

After a debate over whether or not to hike back down the hill, we wisely opted for the crazy steep funicular which spit us out in Barrio Bellavista. Next stop: La Chascona, one of Pablo Neruda’s extremely peculiar homes for his secret love, Matilde.

This crazy little house is chock full of weirdness and well worth a visit, even if you have no idea who Pablo Neruda was.

By this point in the day, we were all running on fumes, so we headed over to a rooftop bar Russ had spotted from La Chascona which was–shocker–called Matilde. All three boys were equally unimpressed by the menu but still managed to gobble down a triple chocolate concoction and get in an argument over it. And they were still starving, so we left Matilde in search of Emporio La Rosa, an ice cream place I’d heard was spectacular.

Long story short: this was the first of many mapping and researching mistakes I made during this trip. We walked and walked and walked and then walked some more trying to find it. We went back and forth and asked for help and by the time we retraced our steps to the tiny front door of Emporio La Rosa, no one was speaking to each other.

We tried to walk around the corner to squeeze in a visit to the MAVI (Museo de Artes Visuales), but it was closed for renovation. Big bummer.

Sweaty, tired, and in desperate need of a shower, we headed back to our apartment in hopes that our place was finally ready for us.

It wasn’t.

But the host had left us a bottle of wine, and we had full use of the space, so we showered and headed back to the Costanera Center. Our plan was to go to the top of the Gran Torre for sunset and then grab dinner (at the mall again) before taking the short walk back to amend the apartment situation.

The Gran Torre was pretty spectacular, even if Santiago was shrouded with smog.

The next morning found us surprisingly jet-lagged for being in a place only two hours ahead of our time zone, and we wound up calling an audible on our plans. Rather than hitting multiple museums in the Quinta Normal area, we ate a late (very late) brunch, and then tackled the Santiago Metro (successfully, I might add).

We found the Metro to be a full on party train complete with live musicians, live animals, and people selling all sorts of things. And in typical Herakovich fashion, we did not add much civility to the public transportation system.

The Museum Interactivo Mirador was well worth the nearly hour long hike it took to get to it. My boys love a good science museum, and this one now sits prominently at the tip-top of our all-time favorites. We ran through an odd outdoor display of multi-colored plastic tubing, lay on a bed of nails, experienced an earthquake in a 4-D movie shown inside a tiny house, created interactive artwork, and learned about waves, mirrors, and forces all in Spanish. We also managed to spend the majority of the day there.

We managed to miss a proper lunch, so by the time we left the MIM, we were again riding front and center on the struggle bus. Rather than walk the 15 minutes or so back to the Metro (and endure another multiple-train-switching labyrinth), we called an Uber with sights on grabbing a quick snack and replacing some of the museums we’d skipped that morning.

One look at a [very hard to find, btw] map of Santiago or any guide book will show the Chilean National Museum of Fine Arts in large, bold print. Maybe we were coming off a sensory overload, but we found it a bit desolate (minimal exhibitions), hyper-uber-radically-liberal (a contemporary art piece consisting of a video of a woman breastfeeding another adult while a glass of milk is being poured on the floor), and–to be completely honest–brutally hot.

We left and proceeded to spend a solid half-hour in search of a snack place that fit everyone’s needs. In the end–and after an ice cream break–we found ourselves at the foot of Cerro Santa Lucia, a site I’d planned on us seeing our last day in Santiago, not our second.

But the best laid plans and all that…

Anyway, calling this a hill is being nice to it; it’s actually the remnants of an ancient volcano, so it’s more of a rocky, pointy triangle. It’s also the place where Santiago was first claimed as a city.

At the very top is a very crowded turret of Castillo Hildalgo and more wide-open views of Santiago. It’s worth the climb even if it’s an often precarious one due to crooked, slippery stone steps.

We climbed back down Cerro Santa Lucia and ambled through some small, colorful gardens and fountains sprinkled around the return path and then headed to Barrio Bellavista for some much needed dinner.

Barrio Bellavista–where La Chascona is located–is considered the bohemian/artsy area of Santiago which means it’s generally a pretty hopping place. Patio Bellavista is a hip, open air marketplace filled with restaurants, creperies, ice cream shops, and vendors of Chilean knick-knacks. We settled on dinner at La Rosita and headed back to the apartment for the night.

After two full days in Santiago, we were feeling brave and ready for a few adventures outside the city. Next up, Chilean road trips!