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I must issue a disclaimer — I am a horrible knitter.

With that out of the way, let me tell you how I came to knitting. I decided to learn after placing two fabulous knit shops in their commercial spaces in Portland: Close Knit and The Naked Sheep Knit Shop. I approached my mother (who is excellent with all things craft) for lessons and she taught me (as well as Tom, Ian and Zoe) to knit over a Christmas vacation.

We were astonished at how hard it was to knit with a consistent gauge and we had tremendous difficulty not adding or dropping stitches. During our holiday festivities, we created abominations out of yarn, which my mother kindly labeled “fiber art.”

Eventually, I achieved enough facility to start (and finish) a project — it was a scarf. I discovered too that I love to knit while traveling — bus, car, diners, planes. So, my current modus operandi is to work on easy scarf projects with interesting yarn while bumming around on sabbatical (the fancy yarn is an attempt to compensate for the fact that I do zero in the way of complicated patterns).

The scarf pictured here is one that I completed just before making it to Southern Patagonia, and am I ever glad. It is a microfiber yarn with a carry-along thread that has a tight weave. It is toasty warm and has accompanied me everywhere, including glacier walking, as shown above. Completing it wasn’t easy, I didn’t have a crochet hook to thread the ends through the edges of the scarf, but Mom came to the rescue and suggested I use tweezers (something I don’t travel without given my eyebrows). It worked like a charm!

I’ve received a lot of funny looks as we’ve traveled throughout Argentina, it seems that knitting has not experienced the resurgence here that it has in the United States. (One Argentinian woman thought I had knitted the whole scarf with the tweezers when she saw me weaving in the ends.) Most Argentines are surprised to hear how popular knitting is with younger people back home. Aside from the puzzled and embarassed-on-my-behalf looks, I do receive many encouraging smiles from older Argentinian women, especially in rural areas.

I contemplated entitling this post, “best bathrooms at a national park…” Don’t worry, I won’t elaborate further!

The first portion of our visit to Southern Patagonia’s Glacier National Park involved spending an hour on land viewing the north and south faces of the Perito Moreno Glacier. Before arriving, we weren’t expecting the lookout to be spectacular…but we should have been! It was a large area that featured an amazing network of paths and stairs that led us incredibly close to the glacier, offering many different vistas. You could easily spend hours there watching the glacier calve thunderously into the lake.

Perito Moreno Glacier stands roughly 80 meters (262 ft) tall and is 5 kilometers (3.1miles) long. It is very accessible because it is located at about 200 m above sea level and stretches out into a navigable lake. It is a part of the Patagonian Ice Fields, which are the third largest ice fields behind Antarctica and Greenland. Perito Moreno is a stable glacier, in other words, it hasn’t been growing or receding.

All pictures here of the glacier were taken from the lookout.

Mendoza and Bariloche are very popular with expats and Argentines alike, not so El Calafate. We had received less-than-positive feedback about El Calafate before arriving in this southern burg, such as, “You go for a day to see Perito Moreno [the glacier] and then you get out as fast as you can!”

Negative press notwithstanding, we enjoyed our stay here quite a bit. The steppes are beautiful, the vistas and the sky are amazing, and of course the glacier-carved valleys and dramatic snow-capped peaks are breathtaking.

Yes, it is windy as hell, and the weather changes about every 5 minutes, but for me, that is part of the charm.

On a side note, I didn’t realize that El Calafate is named after a thorny, brushy bush that offers edible blueberry-looking fruit that is rather sour and contains a lot of seeds, as pictured above.

What a weird experience, to fly without all of the bells and whistles required by Homeland Security in the United States.

We took our first domestic flight in Argentina from Bariloche southward to El Calafate. It took us literally 45 seconds to get through security and make it to the gate area. And while we were at the gate, we drank water that we took through security (including Ian’s mate thermos), we ate olives in more than 4 oz. of brine solution, and we cleaned our hands with a plus 4 oz. bottle of alcohol gel.

We even received food on the plane at no extra charge — it was like time traveling, frankly.

(Our “no Homeland Security” bliss carried us through Zoe spilling her full coke all over her pants and her fleece on the plane and helped us navigate through the monsoon rains that greeted us in El Calafate.)

Rest assured, we did venture out of doors a few times during our trip to Bariloche!

We took a boat to the myrtle forest, which contains the cinnamon-colored trees in the picture below. Local legend has it that Walt Disney visited here and based his forest in the movie Bambi upon the area; however, after a little research, it seems that this legend has at least as many detractors as it has supporters.

We took gondolas and chairlifts to the peak of Cerro Catedral, where there were still patches of snow in the midst of summer. The girls were throwing snowballs and sledding.

We hiked. We visited Isla Victoria. We went rafting. The kids enjoyed English TV on Dish Network. We rented a car and did our first driving in Argentina. We lunched at the Llao Llao hotel. (It burned down the year after it was first built and had to be constructed from scratch again — yikes!) We learned that we hate the dogs in Bariloche (they all live outside of gated houses and bark ALL.NIGHT.LONG). Zelda got car sick again at one of the post popular scenic lookouts! We had one of the best meals we’ve eaten in South America at a restaurant called Naan — really amazing. We have officially burned out on steak and potatoes big time.

Most people visit the beautiful lake district of Argentina for, well, the lakes and the mountains and all of that jazz.

Tom and I wonder why tourists focus on that nature stuff when they can go to the local casino and play craps? Below, please find our report for those of you wishing to travel to Bariloche to shoot some dice.

Table Security Sucks. The stickman moves the dice out to the shooter and leaves them there the entire time that the dealers are paying bets, making it easy to switch dice if one was so inclined. They pay items out of order so that you can past post (put money down after the roll) very easily since the dealer is looking in the wrong direction. There is no boxman or floorman to supervise the action (they do have two cameras on the table though).

Single Odds Only. Don’t stack your money on the pass line or in the come — they only allow single odds. Needless to say, we caused a huge table-wide discussion amongst the dealers when we took odds on a come bet. They couldn’t figure out how to set up the bet.

You Need to Speak Spanish. I hadn’t really thought about it before we went, but craps, if you play it right, is a very verbal game that involves giving the dealer mucho information about what you want done with your bets and your money during a roll. The language barrier made it harder for Tom — too bad we hadn’t thought to have a little craps Spanish class prior to our outing! (Now there’s some niche Spanish.)

Lower Payoff on the 6 and 8. Normally, $12 wins you $14 if you make a place bet on the six or eight. In Bariloche, you needed to make a $10 bet to win $11. Not sure why they did this, but I suspect it was to make it easier for the dealers and players because it keeps everything in units of five. But, the odds are worse than they should be, making it a bad bet.

What do Whitney Houston, Chumbawamba and Katy Perry have in common?

In the early 90s, when I was hopping between tiny Caribbean islands for months, it was impossible to escape Whitney Houston and I Will Always Love You. And when I say impossible to escape, I am dead serious. I almost achieved a state of PTSD over that song. On the other hand, hearing the theme to The Bodyguard now resurrects very fond memories of my travels.

In the late 90s, Tom and I spent weeks on our Honeymoon experiencing the beauty that can only be found in the remote areas of various national parks in the off season — Yellowstone, Glacier, Jasper. Ironically, the song that has become “our song” by virtue of it being played ubiquitously during our post nuptial haze of bliss in the middle of nowhere is Tubthumping, by Chumbawamba!! (What’s not to love with lyrics like, “He drinks a whiskey drink, he drinks a lager drink…” and “I get knocked down, but I get up again?” These are classic marriage themes!)

Fast forward to the new millennium. Traveling throughout Argentina, I Kissed a Girl by Katy Perry seems to cue up in every restaurant, bus, grocery store and gym that we enter. It has become the song we shall always associate with Argentina.

Weird, I know!

Two posts in a row from Tom. Must be some kind of record!

It’s no secret that we love the Kindle. We’re carrying two of them on our travels, and they’re almost always in use. And while the battery life of a Kindle is quite impressive, it unfortunately does need to be charged on occasion.

That’s no problem when you have a charger. But, in the interest of saving space in our luggage, we decided to bring just one Kindle charger.

And then, we broke it.

So, here we are, in a small town in Patagonia, with another month of traveling ahead of us where we will only be venturing to even smaller and more remote towns in Patagonia, facing the prospect of watching our Kindles slowly fade to black, with no way to revive them until we return to Buenos Aires.

Unless we can find a replacement charger.

I began the search by sending an email to Amazon’s customer service with a plea for help. Amazon’s customer service is rightfully held in high regard, and I’ve always had good experiences with them, but in this case, they just fell down on the job. Their email reply was short and to the point; We can’t send a charger outside of the US. We can’t recommend any charger other than the two available in the the Kindle Accessories store, but one is out of stock, and we probably wouldn’t send the other overseas anyway.

But, the accessories store wasn’t a complete dead end. It contained a clue. The third-party Kindle charger they offered was the iGo charging system, which has a “power tip” that works for the Kindle. And, from reading the iGo Web site, I learned that that very same power tip is also compatible with a long list of cellphones.

Which meant that all I needed to do was find a charger for one of those cellphones and our Kindles would be back in business.

So, armed with the printout of compatible devices, we visited the cell phone shops of Bariloche and started rooting through their replacement chargers. Soon enough, we found the cargador viajero from Tecnocel. This quality piece of Chinese engineering has now recharged our Kindles successfully several times, and has thereby saved our vacation. Or, at least the parts with the really long bus rides.

Hopefully, any other Kindle users who are stranded outside of the US without a working charger will find this information useful. It sure would have been nice if Amazon’s customer service had spelled out this possibility in their original email response.

Note for readers: Another post by Tom. As a general rule, you’ll find that all alcohol-related posts are authored by Tom.

It’s hard work tasting wine in Mendoza. You’ve got to hire a driver or rent a car so you can wander from vineyard to vineyard. At each tasting room, you can only sample a single winemaker’s output. And, if you’re joined by two children, how many wineries can you really visit before the little people begin to mutiny?

Luckily, Ian and I discovered that there’s a better way: The Vines of Mendoza Tasting Room. It’s a beautiful room located right in the heart of downtown Mendoza, and it offers a comprehensive menu of wines from almost every winery in Mendoza. All of which you can enjoy in its courtyard underneath a canopy of vines, or at its elegant bar, or perhaps in one of its private salons, which is where Ian and I found ourselves.

Since the experience of tasting wine in a private salon couldn’t possibly be snooty enough, and since I have next to no knowledge of the vintner’s art, we clearly needed a guide. Someone who could accompany us on our sensory exploration of three emblematic wines of Argentina. Someone who could teach us how to savor a wine, understand it, and appreciate it.

Which explains why there is a wine glass full of dirt in the accompanying photo. And others with jam, and mushrooms, and various fruits. Fully appreciating the wine involves identifying the various scents and tastes that give each wine it’s unique character. So, we used these glasses to give us a vocabulary of scents, so we could single out the plumminess of one wine, the hints of tobacco in another, and the citrusy goodness of a third.

Sounds simple in theory, but I quickly discovered that it’s much, much more difficult in practice. Our guide taught us the five alliterative steps to taste a wine: see, sniff, swirl, sip, summarize. But, most of our time was spent sniffing a wine, and then sniffing the various scent glasses to to try to figure out what we were smelling in the wine. Is that dried mushroom I smell? Chocolate? Definitely not lemon. But…something fruity…Cherry? Strawberry?

I would consider my choices. Ian would mull over his choices. And, once we had reached our final conclusions about a particular wine, we would reveal our choices…and discover that we completely disagreed. If I smelled raspberry, he sensed tobacco. If I thought lemon, he chose ginger.

Clearly, improving my scent vocabulary is going to require a lifetime of smelling…and sadly, a lot more drinking as well.

1) Get a seat on the top of the bus (if it’s a double decker). The bottom sucks — you are close to the bathroom so it smells bad, you can’t see out the front, the ceiling is low so there is no overhead storage for bags, and it’s noisier because you’re closer to the engine.

2) Bring earplugs. Most of the buses will blare movies out over crappy speakers, so if you don’t want to hear five Adam Sandler movies in a row as you’re sleeping, then earplugs will help. (For what it’s worth, the General Urquiza bus we rode turned the volume all the way down and made riders use headphones, which was lovely. Also, we asked the steward to turn the volume down at various times on different buses and they would often turn it down or off.)

3) Bring noise canceling headphones (if you have them). If you are going to watch “Step Up 2 the Streets” (which the girls loved) then the sound is much better through the headphone jack than over the speakers.

4) Rated R movies are the norm. If you have younger kids, be prepared for the fact that your children are going to hear and see HIGHLY inappropriate movies for their age group, both in terms of violence and sexual content.

5) Buses are made for short people. If you are 6′ 2″ or taller, then ejecutivo, or first class, where the seats lay down, will be a bit too small for you. Tom had to have his legs bent at all times. He also noticed that the foot area in the next class down was too small for his 11 1/2 sized feet, so he had to keep his feet turned to the side at all times.

6) Bring your own toilet paper and some alcohol gel for your hands — our experience is that the bathrooms are spectacularly gross. After a few hours, the toilet paper looks like it has been stored on the pee encrusted floor and the handwashing is minimal. (Also remember, no bowel movements on the bus bathrooms, so plan accordingly.)

7) Bring your own healthy snacks. The breakfast that they serve on the bus is normal Argentinian fare: cookies and candy bars, which leaves you with a serious sugar low after a crappy night’s sleep. Fruit, juice, and extra water are all a good idea.