A day in my life in Argentina...

We took a road trip from our main 'road trip' to El Chalten, which is in the northern part of the Glacier National Park. We went on December 23rd so we could get back in time to spend Christmas Eve in El Calafate. I call it a road trip because we left our BIG backpacks at our hotel in El Calafate and just took the bus with our overnight stuff.

So, the morning started in our hotel in El Calafate (quite nice as we decided to splurge for Christmas). My alarm clock went off at 6:30am, the earliest I've gotten up since I had to get up at 4:30am when I left Jaco, Costa Rica. Neither of us were pleased so we went back to bed until 7am. Breakfast is included and they had homemade bread, homemade banana cream pie, homemade quince pie (which I don't really know what that is but it's a red fruit that you can't eat raw but is good for baking) and tea. As we were walking 2 blocks to the bus station at 7:45am I started complaining about how tired I was. And then I started laughing and telling Liz how much shit my friends would be giving me if they knew I was complaining about waking up early to go see more amazing sights in South America. So...I laughed a little and stopped complaining about the early hour.

The bus ride was 3.5 hours. It was really beautiful but once again looked almost exactly like Utah. I took half of a motion sickness pill (any of you who know me know that I can get motion sick practically by thinking about riding in a bus or the back of a car). So, along with the EARLY rise and the pill, I was pretty sleepy. Each time I would wake up on the bus I would open my eyes and if the scenery looked the same as Utah, I just closed them and went back to sleep. According to Liz we did pass a lake with one iceberg. She thought about waking me up...but has learned that I can be a tiny bit grumpy when I don't have my sleep :) So she decided she would only wake my up if I started drooling on myself, which I guess didn't happen because she never woke me up.

We arrived into El Chalten around 1pm and checked into our room in a cute little bed and breakfast. We layed down on the beds at 1:30pm and agreed that we would leave for a hike at 2:00pm. It was almost 2:00pm when Liz said, we should go before I fall asleep, and I replied, yeah. We woke up 2 hours later. We have to wake up once at 6:30am and not only can we not pull ourselves out of bed until 7:00am, we have to take a 2 hour afternoon nap. Anyway, we did go on a small hike to view the town. It was super windy so we hurried down and then stopped for a submarino (steamed milk into which you drop a chocolate bar), then soup, then pizza and a bottle of wine, and a piece of chocolate cake. Needless to say, we're not looking as trim as we were in Bariloche...but I think you'll agree with me that it was a fabulous end to a fantastic day!

Photos of El Chalten & Christmas in El Calafate.

Hasta luego...