Putting the "America" in South America - Part 2

After our full day enjoying the architecture and beach in La Serena, we jetted on over to Coquimbo with our photographer Kyle Hepp. Coquimbo is the neighboring port town to La Serena. At the edge of Coquimbo is an old fort that looks like ramparts of a castle - a very romantic location for an evening photo-shoot!
There's a café at the fort, and in the summer there's live jazz in the evenings outdoors!
The best part of the fort is the view of La Serena. Coquimbo juts out to form a bay with La Serena - you can see the entire city in lights at night.

Since our photographer flew up (down?) to visit us from Santiago, we had her the next morning, too! We really wanted to capture a bit of our life around the recinto, our astronomer-gringo home away from home.
Plus we needed an excuse to get cute shots of our dog Beau ;).We're a family! This is the pathway I walk down to get to work (above). The entire community (25 homes on a hill) is lavishly gardened. We're actually required to employ a gardener for our own house!
With our dog trainer, we've been teaching Beau some pretty sweet tricks. This is "high-five". First he sits on his hind legs ("high"), then he gives us "five"! Later we're going to teach him how to walk ("zombie" - what else would you call that crazy saunter dogs do?).Even though I know it's a bit out of the ordinary, I'm so glad we had our photographer Kyle stay the night with us! It's a rare thing to meet United-Statesians that aren't in astronomy here. Now we have a friend to stay with when we go to Santiago! Plus we were able to finagle four different locations for our photo shoot ;)

How did you choose your location for your engagement photos? Did you find yourself becoming friends with any of your vendors?