Sunday my wife and I returned from an awesome vacation in Santiago, Chile. It was the first time this year that I went email/internet free for 6 full days. I did bring along my tablet so I could offload the gigantic photos that my Nikon D70 takes, but other than doing that I didn't touch the machine. I did carry my Audiovox 5600 around, but only got 3 phone calls. At $2.99 a minute for international roaming, I didn't want very many.
Not doing email for a few days at Microsoft is a hard decision some times. You are essentially postponing the inevitable. At least one full day going through a couple hundred unread items when you first sync up. Since we had a 2 hour layover in Miami on the way back, I ponied up $6 for T-mobile wifi, watched in horror as Outlook downloaded 35 MB of email, and then spent the next 8 or so hours getting my inbox back down to pre-vacation levels (5 messages or so). Not only that, but this was a very stressful 8 hours as I watched the past week unfold between my eyes.
Anyway, my wife and I were thankful for my time away from email. I think from now on I am going to spend real honest to goodness vacation time (the 3 weeks I get a year) not doing any work e-mail. I think doing e-mail on your vacation sets a bad precedent that basically tells your co-workers that you are always available to respond to issues and problems. I think the same is true for weekends and evenings. For the past few weeks I've tried to not respond to e-mails on Saturday etc.
Back to Chile. What a cool country. This is now the second South American country I have visited (Brazil being the other). Chile is a very modern country, and has a lot in common with California. Excellent wines, rocky and beautiful coastline, and enormous mountains. The Wine is a heck of a lot cheaper though. At the nicest restaurants I never paid more than $11 for a bottle. Furthermore, I never paid more than $55 for a three course meal with wine for two. And this is with a weak dollar (about 10-15% weaker than normal). Pisco Sour's are great drinks, I happen to like the Peruvian variety better. Much like Capirina, the national drink of Brazil.
While we were there, Lora and I roamed the city for 2 full days, visited 2 wineries (Concha y Toro, and Undurraga), visited the beach towns of Viña del Mar and Valparaiso and took a tour up the Andes to see some ski villages (of course it was summer when we were there). Concha y Toro, and Undurraga are both two of the large wineries, and comparable to say Robert Mondavi and Neibalm-Coppola in size and quality. We liked Undurraga a lot more, and they happen to have a really cool wine bottle design that only they are licensed to use in Chile.
Furthermore, we discovered a new wine varietal, Camenere, that is only readily planted in Chile as most of the world population of this grape was killed by Phylloxera.
Overall it was a fantastic trip, and we'll definitely return to Chile to check out the North and South of the country that we didn't get to see this time around.