Thursday, 12 Dec 2019
Good Morning Friends! Today I 'll start trying a new type of Travelogue! Wish me luck.
As usual we had our annual Holiday Dance before we left. This time we still had a few more sessions before we actually left, but still wanted to share a few pictures. Some of the finger foods were really inventive, like the Santa Bellies & the Reindeer. Attendance was good and the Blinkies were festive.
Our sunset on Wednesday was gorgeous as usual.
Our flight out of PHX was easy & uneventful. Landing in Dallas for the first leg was also a piece of cake.
We just recently acquired a new credit card that gives us access to all airport priority lounges, so we took advantage of The Club at DFW during our 2 hour layover. Enjoyed our first vacation toast!
Taking off from DFW gave us phenomenal full moon view over the downtown area. Goodbye North America.
After a LONG boring 10 hour flight, I opened my window to a gorgeous view of the Andes. The scenery continued from the dry high altitude to include glaciers, rivers, & finally Buenos Aires. We had traveled about 4000 miles SE from DFW.
We arrived at our hotel after an hour bus ride from the International airport (immigration was miserable - took about 2 hours!). Straight through town. We recognized some sites from before like the building with the likeness of Eva Peron. Anyway, when we got to the hotel, Maria, our guide was there & already had us checked into the rooms, so up we went. She gave us 45 minutes to get settled in & we were to meet her back downstairs. Our room was AWESOME. Fabulous view of the Obelisk meeting point for the city. Interesting Espresso maker - Argentine version of the Kureig?
After our short orientation walk, we headed out to buy our evening bottle of wine. She had shown us a small local market with a great selection, bought a Malbec for about $5. The exchange rate is quite good for us, but it's a shock because they use the regular $ sign for their pesos - so the $306 we paid looks pretty scary! We also bought pizza & beer at a local Kentucky pizza place. It was a promo & we both had 2 slices with some strange breadish thing on top (we both pushed it aside - Maria said it was made with Garbanzo beans?) & a beer, again the total bill was about $5!!! We walked quite a bit - there are pedestrian areas in both directions from our hotel.
We headed back to our room for a short nap, by then it was time for our orientation meeting. We met the other 4 girls in our pre-trip group. Turns out George has a harem for these 6 days! He is just thrilled (Ha Ha!). There will be 2 other groups heading to Bariloche with us, but we don't interact with them much - Lucas has 12 folks in his group and another lady has 6 in her group. After a short talk about our upcoming pre trip (the best part of the talk was a taste of the Hard Apple Cider that they drink to celebrate Christmas!), we hopped on a bus to go to our first included dinner. It was in a steak house & a glass of wine was included! Yea. I'm beginning to sound like an alcoholic! Tee Hee. Maria told us that you never pass a salt shaker from person to person here. You pass it & sit it on the table & the next person picks it up and so on. She said it comes from the old days when salt was used as currency & if you dropped it, there could be an argument over who's fault it was. So it's just bad to tempt fate!
We made it back to the hotel at dusk & enjoyed the lights as we were delivered back to our rooms. First full day & a bit more of our vacation! Tomorrow we fly to Patagonia!
More tomorrow!
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