Notes From the Road

I am writing from the motor-home, aka. La Boya (which translates to the Buoy) on the road between Puerto Madryn in Patagonia and Buenos Aires. I apologize for not writing in quite sometime, it isn’t as though I’ve been really busy. Maybe it’s because I’ll be home in just over one week (for which I have mixed emotions, but mostly I’m excited as hell). Or maybe because the past few weeks’ adventures have been more tame than those that preceded them…
The last time I wrote I was back in Buenos Aires waiting to return to Bariloche. Perhaps I should explain about why the back and forth between the two places. Maxi runs a tennis club and lives in Buenos Aires, but his sister and her family recently moved to Bariloche. Maxi is in the process of opening a business for his sister and brother-in-law to run making and selling home-made pasta. This last time we went down there we had a few machines trailing behind the motor-home for said business.
Because the pasta business is new to them all and so is the use of the machines, I think you can imagine that we ate a LOT of trial pasta whilst in Bariloche. This includes all types of noodles, raviolis, sorrentinis, etc, but also anything to do with the dough (ie: pizza, empanadas, bread, etc). To my dismay, I have never consumed so many simple carbohydrates in my life (and many of you know how I can put back bread). I am hoping not to come back a little ball of dough, but we’ll have to see about that…
I’ll jump back a couple weeks now to the beginning of the present road-trip in the motor-home. After the delayed-by-over-a-week departure from BA, we set out in La Boya on a Wednesday in the late evening (which by Canada standards means practically in the middle of the night). I believe we stopped to sleep a few hours in a gas station parking lot somewhere around 4am, but I had been asleep long before.
The following day we continued largely uneventfully on the road south-bound. Thankfully there were no major repairs to be made on the motor-home on the journey. Towards the evening of the second day traveling, I took a turn driving. La Boya isn’t exactly the easiest vehicle to drive, although it is easier than the truck. It didn’t help that it was weighed down by the pasta machines we were towing on the trailer. Needless to say, she had a little trouble climbing hills. One particularly ¨steep¨ hill caused the drama of the day when I wasn’t able to down-shift fast enough and the engine stalled. As Maxi was trying to tell me frantically to brake, the motor-home slowly came to a stop and then to my dismay began rolling backwards. I believe it was a combination of the Spanish directions, the fact that it was dark and I couldn’t see the unfamiliar pedals, and the most pressing issue of the poor brake system. What resulted was that the trailer swung out to the side while the motor-home rolled back and the two slammed into one-another. Prior to this incident, Maxi already joked that I seem to break everything (which has some truth to it, but only small and old things that were ready to break anyways), and this didn’t help my case. What was worse was that I was stuck with my foot on the brake while he assessed the damage, all the while thinking that I destroyed the new pasta machines. I was very relieved when Maxi, surprisingly very calmly, informed me that the metal bowl of the dough-machine could be easily bent back into shape, no harm, no foul. In fact he´s so calm and well-tempered that when he fell off the roof of the motor-home in the rain a different day all he did was mutter ¨hijo de puta¨ (son of a bitch) and proceed to quietly change into dry clothes.
Needless to say the rest of said trip continued with me soley as passenger and cook. The following day still had it’s own non-motor-home related incidences. The first began when we stopped to help the victims of a car accident after Maxi spotted a crumpled truck at the side of the highway with passengers inside. The most likely story of what happened to them is that the 2 young guys were traveling over-tired and fell asleep, losing control of the vehicle. I say likely story because neither guy was able to recall exactly what had happened, but the driver just kept saying angrily that he knew he should have stopped the truck to rest. The truck had obviously rolled a number of times. While the other bystander drove to the next town for the ambulance, we stayed with the victims, Maxi trying to pry open the jammed driver´s door and me trying my best to calm the said driver who seemed to be in shock. The top of his head was ripped open, thankfully largely superficially and not bleeding actively, but his clothes were covered in quite a bit of blood. He also seemed to have a broken wrist, while the passenger seemed to have a broken ankle. Both of them are lucky to not have suffered much worse injuries by the look of the truck, and can probably thank their seatbelts for that too.
After being relieved by the arrival of the ambulance, we continued on our travels. Not too soon after, we stopped for another truck that was pulled over at the side of the road. This time it was just a couple who had run out of fuel. As we were pulling the trailer we couldn’t tow them, so Maxi ended up pushing the truck bumper-to-bumper to the next town which was just shy of 20kms away.
I believe the rest of the road-trip went rather uneventfully and we arrived into frigid Bariloche on Saturday. The temperature for the time we were there hovered somewhere around zero degrees with a lot of rain in the town and snow up in the mountains, the latter at least making for some spectacular views. I’m not sure if I mentioned, but Bariloche is situated on the breath-taking Nahuel Huapi Lake, both of which are surrounded by the pre-cordillera mountains.
Aside from eating a lot of pasta, I spent most of the days there playing with the kids, reading, watching TV that I don’t really understand, and shivering from the cold. We slept out in the motor-home most nights to not disrupt the household too much and although it has a heater it was still pretty chilly. That, and when it rained we had some leaks here and there.
As I briefly mentioned in the last post we took a weekend trip to San Martin de Los Andes, stopping for the night on the way back in Villa la Angustura, all of which is in Argentina’s southern lake district which is beautiful. Being that it’s autumn it was stunning, but unfortunately meant that it was too cold to really enjoy being outdoors.
After this trip we returned back to Bariloche for a couple of days and headed put again in the night for the return trip to Buenos Aires with a detour to Puerto Madryn to see the sea lions. I’ll stop writing for now as I’m sure you are all exhausted from this lengthy account.