42.2 mi / 11.6 mph / 2413 ft. climbing
Home: Alejandro’s AirBNB

Rett had laughed off our host yesterday afternoon when he was showing us how to turn on the gas heater, but with the outdoor temperature down to 43F this morning, it was definitely nice to be able to fire it up (surprisingly, everywhere we’d been in highly-developed Chile used portable propane tanks for water/oven/space-heating, like in Peru, while Argentina seems to have municipal gas pipe networks).

The temperature had reached 50F by the time we started riding in a light drizzle. I wore my rain jacket and rain pants the whole day, while Rett went with just her jacket and non-waterproof tights. We caught enough rain to wet our shoetops, but nothing got soaked.

Leaving town we dodged puddles in the gravel streets to get back to the in-town bike path, and then onto the highway once we exited Villa La Angostura, which had fairly-light traffic most of the way. The rain had faded as predicted by the time we stopped for our midmorning snack, and the winds picked up. Though those changes likely had less relation to the time of day than they did to our location, which was increasingly moving us eastward and further from the rain-shadowing (and wind-blocking) mountains.

The forest-surrounded road remained wet for some time though, and I became increasingly angry at the foot-diameter slicks of oil in the middle of the lane glistening themselves into view every 20 yards. Clearly some vehicle ahead of us had been leaking oil, and chances are they were completely unaware of it. But knowing the risks of hitting one of those patches on a steep curvy wet downhill, I couldn’t help but feel like they had been dropped as a personal attack against us. Thankfully we were able to avoid catastrophe for the several miles before they ended, but I still want to see that vehicle operator criminally charged!

The waters of Lake Nahuel Huapi, the multi-lobed and largest lake in the region, was forcing our route southeast for the whole day (boat tours seem to exist to much-more-directly connect Villa La Angostura with Puerto Pañuelo, a port on the southern shore of the lake that was our target for tomorrow, but I couldn’t find anything ferry-like that would take us and the bikes).

Our direction correlated almost perfectly with the winds that come galloping down the Andes, increasing in speed as they roll free on the open Patagonian steppe. We would hit flat stretches where we could coast at 26mph, and it was extremely disconcerting to move at that speed while feeling no breeze on your face (since the air and us were moving at the same velocity). There were 4% uphills where gusts would slam into our backs, causing our legs to spin out when all resistance vanished from our pedals; the wind wasn’t actually pushing us up the hill without pedaling, but that’s exactly what it felt like!

24 miles in, we reached the end of one of Nahuel Huapi’s lobes, and the road made a turn almost straight south to cut up and over a ridge to the next lobe. I feared that the mostly-westerly wind would become a vicious crosswind at that point, but apparently the narrow channel between mountains that is the best route for the road to take is also the best route for the wind to take, so it magically curved with us to continue as the perfect tailwind.

After lunch, the wind came somewhat more from our right side rather than directly behind, and those crossing gusts had me feeling less-stable than Rett, so she would pull away from me while I feathered my brakes to stay under control. That meant I wasn’t right behind her to “guard” her from passing vehicles, and with the wind noise it was difficult for her to detect them on her own, so she was becoming increasingly terrified by them.

So when we reached the end of the southeastern-most lobe of the lake, and made our second turn to the south, that’s where her blood boiled over. And not without cause. Unlike the previous turn, there was nothing to our left to block the wind from our right, so it simply accelerated across the flat surface of the lake and bowled into us with the force of an armored warhorse. Riding was completely out-of-the-question, unless we wanted to risk getting shoved under the wheels of a passing truck. There was a gravel shoulder, so we could at least walk, but even that was almost impossible. Rett’s anger at the vehicles was transferred to anguish that we would now not be able to reach our destination before nightfall. But eventually I was able to get her to understand that our destination was much closer than she thought, and she stubbornly accepted what help I was able to offer.

We laid her bike down (there’s no way it was standing up on its kickstand), I mounted mine, and while she walked unencumbered, I attempted to ride ahead on the gravel shoulder. I had to lean over into the wind at what felt like a 45-degree angle (surely far less in reality), and was forced to put my feet down a couple times as it was still incredibly challenging to keep a line straight enough that wouldn’t push me off into traffic. Eventually I reached the top of a hill, and ran back down to collect her bike and repeat the ride.

And that was it! A quarter-mile of terror, and then the road again turned a bit left, which was enough to make Rett comfortable (more comfortable than me!) riding down the hill. For the last step we made the sharp right turn at the end of the water, which put us directly into the wind, which was actually easier than the crosswind. And by that point we were “in town” and traffic was less-threatening.

Our AirBNB was the best kind, a self-check in with no one around. It’s possibly the smallest fully-equipped AirBNB we’ve ever stayed in, with the kitchen and bed sharing the same room, but perfect for our needs. The bathroom of course was 40% of the size of the main room, due to the need to accommodate the bidet. A “window” in the bathroom opened into a storage room in the three-unit building, so I rolled the bikes around back and stuck them in there with the tools and building materials. I walked half-a-mile straight into that wind (kicking up dust from the gravel streets) to Supermarket Todo, which was unusually inside a small two-level mall, oddly feeling exactly like my “home” Oak Mill Mall in Niles, Illinois. I returned with supplies, we cooked up dinner, and we declared an end to the day where we returned to our normal mode of transportation, and all the extra challenges that come with that.