Roadtrip 1939

Alright. So far Argentina is awesome. It's a whole other world from the last few countries I travelled. It is clean, orderly, super modern, with paved roads and bathrooms with toilet paper. It is also quite a bit more expensive. The food is amazing, especially the grilled meat, as I mentioned. I have been fortunate enough to be invited to a few asados, which is kind of an all day or all night affair including copious amounts of wine and about 10 different cuts of meat slow cook over a carbon grill. All of Maxi's family are really nice and have included me in everything, even though I don't understand everything they say to me. They have fun teasing me but are very helpful and patient and try to talk slowly and explain things when I look confused.
In Buenos Aires we spent some time walking around the Tango district of San Telmo and then the artsy, poorer area of Boca, home of the famous Boca Juniors soccer team. I went shopping one day and was overwhelmed by the amount of stores selling beautiful clothing for cheap. I didn't buy much yet but I'm sure I'll be going back. Maxi manages a tennis club so I spent a fair bit of time there drinking coffee and hanging out while he worked.
On Thursday left for Bariloche, some 1700km to the south of Buenos Aires. The plan was to leave at 4am and drive straight down in one day. Well, apparently the concept of time is the same here as elsewhere in Latin America and we left some time around noon. We took Maxi's red 1939 Chevy pick-up truck which he has been restoring and which has never been on such a lengthy roadtrip. Classic American vehicles are not as common here as in North America and so we got a lot of honks and salutes, etc. and every time we stopped (voluntarily or by technical difficulty), people wanted to talk about the truck.
The first major problem was the vibrating. Maxi stopped a couple times to see that the wheels were on tight and to check who knows what else (because I don't know anything about cars I have no idea). Some time in the afternoon he decided we needed to go to a balancing shop and have it looked at. They took the tires off and the 2 back ones had super warped rubber. They needed to be replaced so we waited a few hours to have that done. By the time we were back on the road it was probably close to 9pm. The GPS told us that we'd gone something like 500km since noon. A couple hours later we stopped for dinner then back on the road. Sometime around 230 am we decided to drive to the next town and stop for the night. We had a few kms left when we passed onto a bridge and the truck started jerking. A few seconds later we were stopped for good because one of the rear wheels fell off. I tried hard not to laugh because it really could have been a lot worse if there had been traffic.
After awhile a nice man stopped to help, he was hilarious- really animated and distraught about the truck. He kept saying what a disaster it all was, flayling his arms around. They went for a tow truck and I fell asleep waiting in the truck. The tow truck ended up to be useless so the decision was made that I would get a ride to the next town with the old man and Maxi would stay with the truck until the morning. The next morning when Maxi came to get me, he said that another truck had come and towed him to a repair shop where he'd been working on the truck all night. We had lunch with the man who had given me a ride and started back on the road. This time with me driving. I don't know if I mentioned, but the driver's side is opposite to where it should be. And I haven't really driven in 5 months, but I did pretty good considering.
After a couple more motor and battery adjustments we stopped again for the night in a small town. The last leg of the journey Saturday went pretty smoothly and we arrived to his sister's house in time for dinner. This is where I have been staying in Bariloche. They have 3 kids- Camila who is 14, Augustine who is 9, and Maria who is 5. They are all super sweet and Augustine wants me to start giving him english lessons today. They are supposed to start at 1pm and I think I'll be late on account of the blog.