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Why do all young children’s finger painting efforts end up as black sludge? Because they enjoy the process of creation and don’t give a rat’s ass about the end product.

Traveling with the girls has been interesting because they embrace this philosophy throughout their lives. We view an overnight bus trip as something to be endured until we get to our destination…they view the same trip as a cornucopia of delights to be experienced: lay the seat down, open the blankets, watch the movies, check out other passengers, eat snacks, plug in headphones… .

The Zs love the docks, the bus stations, the cab rides without seat belts, the airports, sitting at the bar on the boat, going through security, donning life jackets, the airplanes…

I know there is a lesson in there somewhere, and when we get settled in Buenos Aires once again, I’ll try to figure out what it is! (Random vistas from the fjords pictured here.)

Our big travel splurge: a five day small-boat cruise through the inland waterways of Southern Patagonia, including an attempt at Cape Horn.

Charles Darwin’s youthful trip on the HMS Beagle through these areas are what gave him the building blocks for his theories on evolution, and it has been fascinating to retrace some of his steps. Our first full day on the boat included a visit to an area recently vacated by a glacier (the red field of moss pictured here). We also spent time on an island with penguins, cormorants and skua, the latter are fiercely predatory birds that look something like a brown, overgrown bird-of-prey seagull! All are pictured below. (I’m sure my avian-loving parents believe these bird sightings are totally wasted on me!)

The final picture below is from a small island with elephant seals which we visited, but with our camera, it’s hard to make out the big lug…it is the light brown-looking rock on the beach!

I learned a very important lesson in Punta Arenas — Chileans really crack down on parking scofflaws. As we walked around town, I noticed that there were parking enforcement officers stationed literally every two blocks. (They stand sentinel over their small slice of territory all day long.) It seemed that most parked cars had a ticket under their windshield wiper. I’m not sure what the rules are for parking since there were no meters, but these people meant business.

Another fun fact about Punta Arenas is that instead of city buses, they have little cabs with big numbered signs on the top that act as public transportation. The little colectivos stop at scheduled locations and are generally packed, sometimes taking on the appearance of a clown car.

We also learned that Punta Arenas was once one of the most important cities in South America due it’s vital role as a stop for the world’s mariners on the trip around Cape Horn . The town is a quiet village now and is pictured here in the background.

Tom and I put ourselves in the shoes (or crampons) of an adventurer and mini-trekked on Perito Moreno with Zoe (who just made the age limit by the skin of her teeth). In truth, our ice hike was not all that strenuous, but we felt intrepid nonetheless!

(Zelda and Ian went on a boat tour of the glacier since Ian had already walked on a previous visit and Zelda was too young.)

Our trekking adventure began with a boat ride across the lake to access the glacier where it abuts the land (here the glacier flows at about 10 cm a day). After hiking to the edge of the glacier, we were outfitted with crampons and began trekking on the worn path shown here. The trail is light in this photo because it has been worn down to cleaner ice through the darker, dirtier glacier. I wasn’t expecting a lunar landscape when we started!

The tour was limited to the periphery of the glacier. (One wants to avoid the craggy middle with newbies. The ice flows in the center of the glacier at about one-and-a-half meters a day.) The “trek” was 100 percent pure fun that wended through paths with high ice walls and near sink holes in the ice. It also allowed us the chance to imbibe glacier water and whiskey (ye old watering hole on the glacier is pictured below).

If you ever have a chance to take this tour, DO IT!

This photo says it all in terms of why we loved El Calafate.

These were taken on a tour of Estancia Alice, which we had the joy (and luck) of experiencing on a rare warm and windless day that featured dramatic skies due to rainstorms that were on the way. (The ranch is the red-roofed property in the first photo below.)

In advance, we had some fears that the tour might be a bit, well…touristy! But, it was actually quite interesting. We had the privilege of seeing a sheep denuded (which resulted in the single blanket of wool shown on the sheering floor below), we took a nice walk to the lake, we observed some herding dogs in action (gaucho is pictured below), and most importantly to the girls, they got to pet the sheep in their pens for what seemed like hours!

Fun sheep facts. Argentina is the 3rd largest wool producer behind Australia and New Zealand. 50% of the wool produced in the world goes to China. For those of you hoping to open a sheep estancia, you will need about 4,000 to 5,000 animals and 20,000 hectares of land (49,421 acres) to have an economically viable operation. A professional can sheer an animal in 2 to 3 minutes and will usually finish about 300 animals a day.

For those of you who are jonesing to read another dice update from the casinos of Southern Patagonia, you are in luck, for I have just completed my report on the craps table in El Calafate.

(Apologies for our lack of information on “buying the 4 and 10” and hopping bets. We also failed to discover if they allow you to lay odds on the Don’t Pass/Don’t Come — in truth, our basic play freaked out the dealers so much that we just didn’t have the nerve to go the extra mile!)

Table Security is Whacked. They put a lot of trust in dealers here… something rare for a casino, which is always worried about collusion (a dealer in cahoots with a player). In El Calafate, the stickman moves the dice to the dealer on base, who picks them up and physically hands them directly to the player shooting the dice. This is such a huge security lapse, I don’t even know where to begin. There are a lot of opportunities to switch dice here. Table limits don’t really justify organized cheating, but they’re practically begging for it. There was a boxman and there also was one camera on the table that I could see.

Impossible Shooting Rules. Generally, a casino wants a shooter to bounce both dice off of the back wall — how a player gets them there is normally not too much of a concern. Not so in El Calafate, where the rules for shooting were mystifying. They wanted me to throw underhand and have the dice hit the table in front of the table’s midpoint, throwing with enough force that these spotted cubes would continue on to bounce off of the back wall. This is nearly impossible and leads to two problems: 1) the dealers can call a “no roll” on nearly any throw based on how close you get to the “mid-point”; and, 2) the dice plow through all of the chips on the table making a mess.

Too Few Chips on the Table. First of all, they didn’t use real chips. They used a strange plastic chip that had beveled edges and didn’t stack or fit in the rail. Even more unusual, they had about 1/10 of the chips they needed on the table to successfully deal the game. Because of this shortage, the dealers were always trying to color up our chips (exchanging lower denominations for higher denominations). This is a bad policy from a casino’s standpoint because people bet more when they have “bullets,” the denomination of chip most commonly used to wager. You don’t want to exchange the bullets for higher denominations, which a player may put in their pocket rather than wager.

Higher Minimum Place Bets. The table minimum was $10 pesos, but they required $20 pesos to make a place bet, $10 pesos more than Bariloche.

Weird 6 and 8 and Single Odds. Same deal as Bariloche’s casino, only single odds on pass line/come bets and $10 wins $11 on the 6 and 8.

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.)