ODO: 338,352
We wake up to drama and confusion. Our host wants everyone gone. Today. The earlier the better. This is tricky for us because the front end of the truck is in pieces, and now it’s a mad dash to get it back together, all the tools put away, and everything else packed up. But we manage, and plan to meet back up with our newest friends at a local campground after running some errands. The errands are visiting the local olive oil and vinegar factory to get some dipping oil. The whole place smells very strongly of vinegar. At first KoKo thinks the smell is her. Yikes. Then to the fancy bakery to get yummy bread to dip in the oil and vinegar. We are the only vehicles at our new campground, nice and quiet. For dinner, we do the Argentinian thing and build a fire to grill some meat. But at a more reasonable time of evening.
Parrots are LOUD. And this campground is full of them. Twice a day they get active and scream up a storm. After all the activity at our last camp spot, everyone takes advantage of the (mostly) calm to relax. Sort of. Today Jason gets a lot of work done on his truck with Berne assisting. The weather here is perfect. Mid afternoon we head to the store for more meat and veggies to cook on the grill. A small German Sheppard-esque dog decides she would like to live with us now, and moves into our camp spot. She stays all day, and is very well behaved so we encourage her behaviour.
Our dog is still here in the morning! She’s just the cutest! She walks everyone to the bathroom, and every other place we leave the camp spot for, doesn’t beg for food and is very soft and clean. She is very obviously someone’s well cared for dog. We have another slow day, but Berne manages to swap out the fridge fan, freeing up our extra sleeping fan. The fridge fan started dying a couple of months ago, and we were able to repurpose a fan from the camper to keep the fridge from overheating. Now that its getting warm again, the timing of this couldn’t be better. Berne and Jason make some modifications to our inverter set up to make double sure it can handle the instapot we plan to buy. The weather tonight is a little chilly so we all turn in early.
And we are back to the lovely, perfect weather! Jason has a birthday today, the whole reason we came to Mendoza! We set up the outdoor showers (this campground doesn’t have hot water, but luckily Jason and Kara do!) and get cleaned up for a celebration night. Kara starts us with a DIY wine tasting, which includes a white Malbec. Normally Malbecs are red, so this is fun and different. Our next stop is a steakhouse in town via Uber. It’s nice having someone else cook the meat for a change. We split a tomahawk because we want to bring the bone back for “our” dog. Homemade carrot cake is waiting for us when we get home. And the happiest dog in the whole world, when she sees her present.
It was decided last night that this would be a good morning to sleep in, and we are right! We only managed to get through half the cake last night, so its leftover cake for breakfast! Everyone is slow getting into anything today because this is where we part ways….again. We need to be in Santiago by tomorrow to give us enough time to get the truck squared away for storage before we fly back to the Bay Area for some work. The highway to the border takes us through a beautiful river valley that reminds us of Utah. And our old friend The Wind is back. Berne finds us a camp spot up a small, dry river canyon where the wind howls, I mean sings us to sleep.
IT’S COLD! It froze overnight! Apparently we drove up to 8000ft and didn’t notice. It was so cold the heater ran for a couple of hours without overheating the tent. That’s how you know its cold. Today’s road takes us through the mountains on the way to the border where we get up to 9700ft. No surprise, it stays very cold the whole time. To cross back into Chile, we drive into a large building, the border is indoors. On the Chile side of the border we pass through a gnarly ski area. It’s very steep, and the highway looks like it cuts through some of the runs. Yikes. At the bottom of all of the switchbacks we’re back in the heat. And we have a new squeak….Investigating the squeak, we learn that all of our front lug nuts are loose, and one has broken off. When we left the finca in a hurry we only hand tightened them, and then forgot to go back and torque them down. We just got extremely lucky, this could’ve been really, really bad if we hadn’t stopped in time. Our day ends on top of a tall hill outside the city where things are nice and quiet.
Our hill top has a fantastic sunrise. We get a move on. Heading into Santiago, our plan is to find some breakfast sandwiches. Spoiler, we get lost trying to find them and abort mission. Instead we head to an Ikea and a Sodimac (Latin American Home Depot) to find inspiration for an update to our pantry. We leave uninspired. It’s time to start getting ready for our flight, so we find some Thai-ish food and head for the campground. They have three big dogs, one of which we win over immediately by feeding it chicken from our dinner.
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