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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.

I know that some will consider this a blasphemy, but bear with me.

Mendoza, Argentina is considered semi-desert (it receives only about 240 mm of rain a year) and is situated in a bowl surrounded by mountains, similar to Las Vegas. The city is artificially green like Las Vegas, with every street sporting beautiful lush trees which are watered through irrigation ditches that line every sidewalk. (The street trees and irrigation ditches are pictured below.) We also saw gated communities with cookie-cutter McMansions featuring red-tiled roofs, just as you would find in Las Vegas. And, finally, they have a few casinos in town!! (You will be happy to know that they haven’t seemed to embrace a love of neon, however.)

The intense agriculture that occurs in this arid region is entirely due to irrigation from local rivers since the surrounding area exists in the rain shadow of the Andes mountains and would not normally support much farming.

In fact, it is this ability to control vine water consumption along with the warm days and cold nights during the ripening season that allows growers to produce such flavorful grapes for wine production.

We only took one tour of a winery while in Mendoza, and boy was it memorable!

We chose to visit a very small boutique winery owned by Carmelo Patti (he is a local celebrity). His small one-man winery is usually mobbed with tourists, so we were lucky to have him all to ourselves because it was late in the afternoon on New Year’s Eve.

Carmelo’s grandfather made wine for the family in Siciliy, and his father did the same when they moved to Mendoza, Argentina. Carmelo went into the trade professionally and has been a winemaker for some 47 years, in one fashion or another.

As we were deep in the warehouse with Mr. Patti, a tremendously powerful thunderstorm hit and due to a clogged gutter, Mr. Patti’s tasting room began to flood badly. It was raining from the ceiling and pouring out the door like a raging stream. His paperwork and memorabilia were sopping, his giant ancient leather guestbook was soaked, the power went out, and the place was trashed.

Carmelo climbed a rickety ladder to the roof to unclog the gutter. We dropped everything and went into action. The girls worked the squeegees in the tasting room with Ian. Tom and I rescued paperwork, set it out to dry, and began blotting the ancient book. It was crazy.

Not surprisingly, the Zs thought it was the coolest wine tour ever!

We spent about 9 hours in Córdoba, Argentina between Christmas and New Year’s (it was a Saturday). The city was deserted, and as a result, ’twas a wee bit creepy.

Our first stop was one of the larger plazas in the city, Plaza San Martin, the site of the Iglesia Catedral (the back of which is pictured here). We expected the plaza to be a vibrant meeting place for the city’s residents. Unfortunately, it was filled mostly with the three “Ps”: police, pick pockets, and prostitutes.

Córdoba has some excellent examples of 17th and 18th century architecture, which are easily walkable to view in a day. Unfortunately for us, all of the sites were closed. After what we dubbed our “sightseeing death march in the sun,” we gave up and spent the next 7 hours in a cafe eating, surfing, and synchronizing a multi-computer viewing of War Games (all of us using headphones).

On Christmas Eve, we took a two hour off-road trip with Andes 4×4. The day after Christmas, we completed a three hour trail ride that was beautiful. (Although the girls have been on horses many a time, this was their first extended ride, and they adored it.)

Both outings were fabulous. While in the Land Rover, we traversed a completely broken-down trail that was traveled by priests with pack horses from Nono to Cordoba; in those days, the trip would take 5 days. (Now, by car, it takes about 3 hours.) As you can see in the photo below, we were amazed at what our driver, Alejandro, was able to successfully negotiate!

The vista as we descended into the valley was incredible. It was the rainy season, so there is more greenery and wild flowers than you would expect in such a rocky mountain environment.