ODO: 347,037
Two weeks of work pass with a little bit of adventure:
- While out a dinner, a car catches fire in the parking lot. Like a raging inferno. The firefighters arrive pretty quicky, probably because of the Tesla parked nearby. On the way home we pass some teenagers that were taking their newly purchased Costo shed home on a borrowed (stolen) Costo cart.
- We had a power outage at work that lasted about an hour. It completely shut down our production testing for the next few days because the system did not like the surprise shut down.
- Our weekend included a surprise birthday for a good friend at a fancy steak house, and a rug tufting date.
- Our second week was less eventful. Our second weekend included another friend dinner, which was great, and some time at an RV show, planning for what we want to do after this (is this how foreshadowing works?).
The day is here, time to go home! And the best part, we are leaving at 11am instead of midnight! But that means we arrive at 5:30am local time, which will feel like 1:30am PST. Oh well. We have two very uneventful flights, with a short stop in Panama City and a quick trip through Paraguayan customs. Berne’s bag is one of the first to come out of the plane. KoKo’s bag is one of the last, which had us very nervous. One very short taxi ride, and we are reunited with out house! And the campground dog, who is VERY excited to see us again. In more good news, the truck battery is fully charged, no major outages while we were gone! In not surprising news, our tire with the slow leak needs some air. That’s an after nap problem. Which we do for most of the afternoon. Night brings rain, and the sounds of this campground: loud fireworks, loud music, loud cars. Good thing we’re really tired. Thunder and lighting accompany the rain. And the weirdest noise, a four note whistle that repeats a lot in the middle of the night.
We made the mistake of not forcing ourselves to stay awake yesterday, so our sleep cycle is extremely off of this time zone. Maybe relaxing all day will help. We start to pick away at unpacking and route planning. KoKo installs her new air mattress, and one of the campground dogs steals her flip flop. A nice quiet day. The whistle sound returns, and some quick googling says its likely a bird. Using our birding app, we try to verify the noise but never find anything that really matches. The other google result is dangerous spirits.
We wake up in the middle of the night, and are up for a handful of hours because, jetlag. When we actually wake up, its late morning. We get after organizing and finishing unpacking. The neighborhood is filled with the sounds of soccer and Sunday get togethers. This will be our final night in Paraguay, so we Uber to the store for a mini resupply. And we want a dinner that isn’t cup-of-noodle for the third night in a row.
It’s finally border day, leave Paraguay behind, get back to being our usual selves, adventure time day! Our last Paraguay stop is for some yarn for KoKo’s Sweater of the Americas. Entering Argentina for the seventy-fifth time is no problem. Our next stop, unsure. Just in the general direction of the province of Salta and the desert. We find a great municipal campground for the night, with a sweet dog and a pack of helmeted guineafowl. But tiny biting bugs drive us inside early.
Across the border, we do a full resupply, then head off into the wilderness. Sort of. Mostly we drive through cattle land. People have lots of small fires going to clear more land. Mid day we hit classic, bad Argentinian roads. Since we are still getting our road wheels back under us, we only drive a couple of hours to a new campground. This one has a resident rhea, Gil (our name for it) that is comfortable getting much too close to people. KoKo takes advantage and does a little photoshoot with Gil. Early evening, we get started on our new Starlink mini mount. Unfortunately, we start too close to mosquito o’clock. Half way through, we admit defeat aka no interest in being itchy, and head inside for the night.
