In 1969, two pretty girls graduated from college and set out on an improbable journey: they drove from Fort Lauderdale, Florida to Santiago, Chile to get to a New Year's Party. They travelled along 12,000 miles of roads and were three months late. Along the way, they met dictators and revolutionaries, generals and peasants. What began as pure adventure gradually became a voyage of love, danger and self-exploration that challenged everything Hope Boylston thought she knew about the world. Boylston experienced one of the grand social experiments of the last century. Allende was the only freely elected socialist government South America has ever had. Although Boylston's stories are mostly very personal, the events that surrounded them were momentous. Salvador Allende's three-year "peaceful" revolution was followed by General Pinochet's 17 year dictatorship. Her essays record these extraordinary experiences with passion, humor and a fine sense of the absurd.