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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).

This public hygiene oxymoron is pictured to the left — they are the green and pink egg-shaped items suspended over the sinks on metal bars. The first time that we encountered these in a public restroom, none of us could figure out what they were (it’s as if the girls and I mentally erased their existence) and we proceeded to search high and low for the soap. I’m not sure upon whom it finally dawned that we were supposed to rub our hands on the Easter egg hanging over the sink!

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.

Christmas at the estancia really started on Christmas Eve, which is the important day here in Argentina.

As Papa Noel was flying around the world delivering presents, we were erecting our Christmas tree that Fred Johnson sent to me before we left Buenos Aires. The girls and I had a ball putting it together. Of course, it called for craft glue to attach the ornaments and the snow drifts to the tree. Surprisingly enough, I don’t travel with my hot glue gun, so we improvised and used some athletic adhesive tape. We grew quite fond of this little tree, although the girls were somewhat concerned about presents fitting under it!

We took our tree to Christmas Eve dinner, which featured suckling pig (pictured below on the parilla — Zoe had a heart attack because she saw them butterflying the pigs whole). We had singers entertaining us during the meal, they lit off some fireworks afterwords, and then, past midnight, the Argentinian kids opened their presents. Everyone young and old partied into the night.

We, on the other hand, went to bed. When we got up in the morning, the Zs were delighted to discover that Santa was able to locate us. He used the Christmas socks that Fred sent us as stockings and there were presents around our little foam tree. It was a lovely, simple Christmas that we all enjoyed. (And a big thanks to Fred Johnson for all of our Christmas accoutrement).

QUIRK: Garbage Cans. Why is it that every cabin and every hotel room that I’ve stayed in has only one garbage can located in the bathroom; and why is said garbage can so tiny that you can fit exactly nothing in it; and, why does this garbage can have a lid with a rotating top that cannot function if there is actually any garbage in the bin?

QUALITY: Dulce de Leche…for breakfast…I mean caramel in the morning, does it get any better than that?

QUIRK: Flash Web Animation. In planning our two months of traveling this summer, we surfed a lot of sites from all over the country, and it seemed that EVERY site used the same Web designer because they all had a flash splash page that took forever to load and featured background music that could not be turned off.

QUALITY: Everyplace that we have traveled in the campo has had fabulous neighborhood dogs that kept the girls occupied for hours.

QUIRK: Maps with No North. We have noticed that in Argentina, maps are often displayed with an eye toward a pleasing layout and often do not have any indication of which way is north! Of one thing you can be certain though, north is not at the top of the page.

QUALITY: You can sit in a cafe for absolutely ever, sipping on agua or cafe con leche, and the waitstaff will never try and roust you out of your seat. (We truly tested this in Cordoba where we encamped at a cafe for 6 or 7 hours during our layover. At one point, we had two computers plugged in, running movies which four of us were watching on headphones with Y adaptors…no problem!)

Yes, more family traveling disasters as we ventured from northwestern Uruguay to the Sierra mountains of Argentina (southwest of Cordoba).

We started for Montevideo on the Saturday before Christmas, leaving Punta del Diablo at 11:15 a.m. (pictured here at the bus stop). The car that we were counting on to help schlep our bags into town wasn’t available, so we had to sprint, in the sun, over dirt/sand roads, with our suitcases to make it to the bus stop on time! The bus trip to Montevideo was long and hot, but generally uneventful, thank God!

Sunday, at mid-day, we took a boat from Montevideo to Buenos Aires, Argentina. In BA (which felt like home) we had a 7 hour layover, during which we had to run a zillion frantic Christmas and travel errands. At 10:30 pm on Sunday, our overnight bus left Buenos Aires for Cordoba, where we arrived at about 7:30 a.m. in the morning on Monday.

After an hour at the Cordoba bus station, we were preparing to depart for Nono, Argentina when Zelda somehow managed to fall into a giant grease slick, getting herself and her bag covered with a thick coating of engine oil (about 2 minutes before our bus left). We boarded the micro (small bus) and began our journey on a long winding road that climbed up through the clouds into rocky terrain. Really beautiful. Unfortunately, the bumpy ride with cloudy visibility whilst sitting in the back of the bus on twisting switchbacks caused Zelda to get sick, really sick. (Luckily, all of Zelda’s childhood illnesses involved massive amounts of vomiting, so she’s pretty nonchalant about the whole thing…and rather neat as well! Poor bean.)

Upon our arrival in Nono (Zelda sporting a combination of grease and vomit), we took a local taxi over rocky roads, gravel, through a creek, and after about 20 or 25 minutes, we arrived at our final destination: the estancia La Lejania. (It only took 51 hours of traveling from Punta del Diablo.)

What is the first thing that we did at the estancia? I’m afraid that we accidentally locked Ian in the cabaña. He had to escape out a window with a pretty big drop off. Needless to say, he wasn’t too pleased.

[And apologies for the posting blackout, we were without Internet access this past week.]

It is our last night in Punta del Diablo, the town that made the Lonely Planet Top Ten Places to Visit in 2008. We have had a lovely time decompressing; enjoying the slow pace and empty beaches. And, as an added bonus, Zoe said that she had her best birthday ever (of course she says that every year).

Should you decide to visit, we have our own guidebook observations below.

• Pack some warm layers. The wind really howls and it’s cold at night.
• Don’t expect a super fine white sandy beach with clear water, a la Mexico or the Carribean. The sand is nice, but can get a little bit rocky as you enter the water. And the waves–a pounding Atlantic surf that is cool when you first submerge yourself. (Kind of reminds me of Oregon a bit, actually.)
• The town is spread out, so if you rent a cabin, make sure that you are close to the grocery store and the beach, otherwise you might be doing more walking than you anticipated.
• Make sure that your rental accommodations come with sheets and towels. (Something we learned the hard way!)
• Even though we didn’t stay at the El Diablo Tranquilo Hostel, we would recommend them highly. We ate at their restaurant nearly every night, we rented their surf boards, they made an awesome birthday cake for Zoe’s birthday, and they let us buy some WIFI time. Top notch organization.

Photos courtesy of Tom and his morning sunrise walk!