Chile update #1

Here's my first update of the trip to Chile. I say that cause I'm gonna be down here for a while so I figured instead of one huge update a month from now I would do several smaller ones along the way. So I left tuesday morning after shoveling a bunch of snow off my driveway and truck, flew all day and all night, and now it's 75 degrees and sunny and it's mid summer so it doesn't get dark till about 9:30 at night, it's awesome. As soon as I got in I met up with norcal dh racer Mikey Haderer at the airport and then we were picked up in a lifted cargo van with a hardwood floor, couches in the back, and home stereo speakers. It's about an hour from the airport in Santiago to Valparaiso where the urban DH race is that I'm racing in this weekend. Along the way it starts out looking like socal, then changes to vineyards and farms, then you pop over the mountains and drop down to the ocean, it's beautiful. So since I got in we just built up our bikes and checked out the city and the racecourse. There's stray dogs everywhere, grafitti everywhere, and the racecourse goes straight down the crazy steep and curvy streets and steps, should be pretty nuts. Well we're gonna head to the beach now and then go to an old prison that has been abandoned and now has dirt jumps built in the prison yard, should be sweet!