67 miles in a pickup truck
Home: The Blue House AirBNB

Our three additional days in San Martin de Los Andes were to wait out bad weather, though we had begun to question that decision a bit. It had definitely rained, but only in spurts, and never extremely heavy. The winds had picked up, but nothing shook our apartment building. And it got much colder, but that only required us to close the doors and windows; we never needed to turn the heat on.

But, no use crying over unspilled rain, at this point it was just nice that we had a method to move forward without pedaling, and to get back on schedule. Our AirBNB host picked us up herself, with her pickup truck, at 9am. She had ropes, knew how to use them (which made one of us), and had a blanket to drape over her tailgate so that we could “rack” the bikes with the front wheels hanging over. Clearly someone who has transported bikes before, so our luck at finding her available to drive us was even better than we’d thought!

And! She also offered (again, we didn’t even have to ask) to give us a bit of a “tour” along the way. The route between San Martin de los Andes and Villa La Angostura is known as Siete Lagos (Seven Lakes), and is a national tourist destination all on its own. We had been sad that we wouldn’t see it from the seats of our bikes, at the ideal speed, but at least we would still be able to see something during the drive. But unlike hitching a ride with a truck driver delivering onions or something, our host was happy to stop at every viewpoint, and give us some local information along the way. It wasn’t as good as riding our bikes, but it was far beyond the next best thing that we could have hoped for!

And! It rained off-and-on (occasionally heavily) for most of the drive. I took that as an indication that the forecast was more accurate for this closer-to-the-mountains microclimate than it was for drier San Martín, and it had likely been raining more here over the last three days than there, making our weather-dodging choice feel more justifiable. With the wet roads, steep hills, and fairly heavy traffic, riding on a day like this would have really made us dislike bike touring, to say nothing of camping in the same conditions.

We had our host drop us in the center of Villa La Angostura, since we had time to kill before our AirBNB was available. The town is another mountain-vacation town like San Martin, though it (at least the main strip) felt more… corporate or something? Though maybe that was because it was a more linear town built along the strip of the highway vs. the well-distributed grid of San Martin?

By way of explanation, we got lunch at a restaurant called “Billy Jean”, where both waiters spoke excellent English. I had a view of our bikes parked outside the large picture window, and a guy in a nice down jacket spent at least 30 seconds admiringly looking them over, and pointing things out to his wife who couldn’t have cared less. And the bathroom could have come out of an upscale US brewpub, with its fancy “architectural” sinks and faucets, and hand dryers (automatic, high flow modern ones), which I’ve seen only a handful of times in South America. The bathroom’s familiarity felt like a fuzzy distant memory suddenly being pulled into focus, and it made me realize that it would feel completely alien (and possibly confusing) to a rural farmer from Peru. Which made me feel an odd bit of pride that our last 7 months of travel have put me amongst the relatively-small percentage of people in the world equally comfortable in an upscale modern bathroom, and one where you have to flush the toilet with a bucket.

We’ll see how long it takes me after getting back to the United States before I stop stacking my used toilet paper in a little folded pile on the floor though!

The grocery store we stopped at on our way back out of the center had a heated curtain of air blowing in front of the exit, showing again the wealth and technological-advancement here compared to the rest of our route in South America, but also how it was pretty cold outside! A bit of dripping rain then had Rett rushing up a steep gravel hill to get to the shelter of our AirBNB, causing her to nearly slide out and crash. We’re so unused to riding in rain that we act like we’re going to melt, which is definitely a deficiency we need to resolve before riding the Carretera Austral!