Birthday raincheck

When planning our route around La Serena, we were constrained by the fact that some of the observatories were only open to tourists on the weekend. In order to visit one of the biggest observatories, we were going to travel north on Saturday 11th, which is baba's birthday.
This wasn't ideal as, rather that planning something special, we would have a day of travelling instead. I'd checked with baba and we agreed to stick with the best route, but, in retrospect, I wish we'd made more of an effort to plan something special for him!
We still had a couple of wine and pisco tours planned, so it was still meant to be a nice day.
However, in the morning we reached out to our Airbnb host for the night, but got no response. We checked his profile and realised the whole property looked suspicious, it was a new listing with no reviews, and had very little information - not even an address! Long story short, I spent about an hour with Airbnb support, eventually getting a refund. Obviously we also had to book some other last minute accommodation which also turned out to be a bit of a headache.
To make things worse, while dealing with it we lost track of time and ended up missing the pisco tour we had been waiting an hour for.
Needless to say, not a great start for baba's birthday! The whole charade really dampened the mood (mainly mine).
Thankfully, we still managed to visit an organic winery called Cavas del Valle, with a free tasting of five delicious wines. We also happened to pass by Capel, the Cooperativa Agrícola Pisquera Elqui Limitada, one of the largest producers of pisco in the country. We had seen their products in pretty much every supermarket, and first tried their pisco sour in Cochamó. Despite being a huge operation, especially compared to the family run outfits we'd visited in Elqui, the tour was very good, and we got to appreciate the scale of production of over 1,000 farmers coming together to form a cooperative.
We eventually made it back to La Serena, where we stayed in a nice flat (which worked out), and had a yummy take-away pizza. We finished watching Griselda on Netlix (we really enjoyed it, it's a crazy story. Look up Griselda Blanco if you've never heard of her!).
Since my birthday is coming up soon, we decided we'll take that opportunity to do a joint celebration, to make up for the mild shambles of baba's birthday (we also recognise it was still a very nice day, and we are very spoilt by how nice every day is!).Read more