A Friend For A Reason

One of my least favorite sayings in the English language is “Everything happens for a reason…” which to my way of thinking is an expression of privilege at its most thoughtless. If you avoid a fatal car wreck because your yoga class was canceled that was blind luck in my rather austere world view, but if everything happens for a reason you’ve got some explaining to do, to a mother watching her child starve in Gaza or South Sudan or in far distant Burma. No reason I can think of justifies such misery helped along by abolishing USAid. Nevertheless on a more cheerful note there is a reason why we are stuck in Uruguay and the reason is not one more disaster falling unbidden upon Team Lost.

We are back at one of our preferred camp spots overlooking the River Plate, a wild and windy place as yet another cold front blows up the estuary off the South Atlantic Ocean.

We wandered around a bit checking out the town campsite closed for the season.

It seemed rather depressing so we took off to spend a night on the cliff tops. 

Rusty was heading to the beach when he spotted a big white dog running on the sand. He turned around, the prudent older dog. 

I didn’t see the dog until after I had spotted the solitary person on the empty winter beach, but Rusty, supposedly developing glaucoma was well ahead of me and I had my glasses on. We returned to our cliff top estate. 

The awful weather has impaired our solar panels from doing their job but a 90 minute drive and some mild solar assistance ( up to 15 amps under bright grey skies) we got the batteries up to 65 percent (300 lithium amps) to see us through the night. Layne got busy looking for flights, I walked the pest. 

Layne got a call from a friend in California, a friend from a group of defense lawyers from forty years ago. She has a remarkable ability to stay in touch, with old friends or new friends met on the road in South America. The call intimated one of their number in Santa Cruz is going through a rough patch. It’s part of the aging process, spouses losing mobility and needing nursing, the body slowing down needing more time, fears ballooning irrationally perhaps but causing real anxiety. Layne had been voted  the best friend to help and she answered the call. 

It’s a matter of finding tickets and figuring out a route and spending two weeks in California. It’s the right thing to do of course but Rusty and I have another stationary period to deal with. 

Except my plan this time is to drive around Uruguay while Layne is gone. I’m thinking about seeking out free camps and visiting campgrounds to use the facilities suffered a few days off the grid. I can’t stand the thought of two more weeks sitting still in a campground. School pickup :

Highway 1 to Montevideo. 

More rain promised all week. 

“Put your cap on” police check ahead. 

Not really, as the substation is abandoned. Cops don’t seem interested in us, even the ones at mobile check points. 

Layne is looking to get a flight Monday from Buenos Aires as flights are cheaper than from Montevideo so she’ll incorporate a ferry ride across the River Plate then take an Uber to the airport. I’ll be driving Rusty up the coast.

He takes things as they come. But I’ll tell you he is coming indoors a lot more than usual this week. The weather is too much even for him and he loves being outside. So much for Spring. 

I keep telling myself at least I’ll be driving, looking for places to park and so forth. I am ready to go north but here we are.  

The heater is working nicely and it’s such a luxury to sit in warmth. The engine is still leaking coolant but not badly and so far it’s not getting worse so we can drive which is a very good thing. It’s been a hard year since we decided to drive to the Guyanas and I’m ready for it to be over and put all these modifications and repairs  and flights behind us. But of course everything happens for a reason. Doesn’t it?

Repaired

Our cabin heater is installed and working. The distributor put a new igniter in it and cleaned out the carbon and it runs hot once again. 

We have learned our lesson and will run the heater at full blast frequently to burn off the carbon build up. A reader asked if we have a carbon monoxide alarm and we do but frankly I don’t trust that stuff so we only run the heater when we are up and awake. If we need heat at night we can use our 110 volt space heater off our batteries to take the edge off a cold night.

This was Adrián’s first job under his new storage roof which is just the first step in building a whole new storage and workshop area. He needs it too as the weather turned ghastly suddenly with thunder lightning and heavy rain. We ended up inside for the evening warm and dry with rain flooding the yard. We also noticed a hurricane threatening the Florida panhandle so we do feel lucky to be here.

We also went into town to do some last minute shopping; I’d run out of honey for my oatmeal, critical stuff like that  plus Rusty usually likes urban walks while Layne shops.

It was Wednesday so the fish truck was in Colonia Valdense, a town whose routines we have come to know quite well but we expect to cross the border to Argentina today which means we don’t need to risk getting expensive fish confiscated. We have had mixed luck at the Fray Bentos border once getting no inspection at all and once getting every fresh item confiscated…And then there was the random lady who came up and asked if we were from Key West:

It was really rather sweet as she remembered her cruise to Key West very clearly, climbing the lighthouse and touring the Hemingway House among other things. She made me nostalgic.

Eagle-eyed Layne spotted a copy shop and we stopped to get our new Florida registration laminated. Our old one was a mess after two years of border crossings and checkpoints so when we got our new registration, good through 2028 we decided to protect it by laminating it for a buck fifty. Rusty waited outside.

Up next: a four day drive to Paraguay and a new cooling system for GANNET2. 

And I took an accidental selfie with my iPhone18.

Me losing control of things as usual.

Rusty And I

While it is true Uruguay is expensive we have found one way to save money here is to free camp and that is made easy by the low level of crime in this country. We awoke Tuesday at Solymar Beach to the beginnings of a sunny day which inspired Rusty to walk.

We were far from the only dog walking people on the beach but I think I was the only one with a camera and I took pictures to record Rusty’s energy. 

It was a lovely crisp morning which inspired Rusty was determined to enjoy as the forecast for later in the week is promising rainy days ahead. Summer is slow arriving this year locals tell me. 

The plan was to drop Layne off at an Indian restaurant for Layne to meet Julia while Rusty and I got a day off together.  

First we had some laundry to do and as this wasn’t our first visit to Montevideo we knew where to go - to the shopping mall. 

To get to our favorite self service, underground, credit card operated laundry in the mall parking lot we had to drive through Montevideo, not only the neat tidy expensive upper class neighborhoods but also the regular shabby streets of this largely rundown city. 

Montevideo is the southernmost capital city of mainland South America but it also carries, at least in my mind, the title of least loved by its managers. Street surfaces are decrepit, decoration is reduced to infernal graffiti everywhere and the city just feels shabby and sad.  

The shopping mall was modern clean and busy though.  

There’s an electronics store where previously we bought a  small Bluetooth speaker so we stopped by to see if they had a dongle suitable for our new phones. We use a device to download pictures from our cameras’ SD cards but the one that worked for our iPhone 12 slots doesn’t work for the iPhone 18.

Theirs looked different but miraculously they had one that works. It’s always a triumph when you find what you need in South America and we snatched up two. $10 in the states  and just a little less here; even the price was right. Amazing.

The supermarket had everything, sauces and condiments to make Laynes heart sing and I found shaving cream which I prefer to foam in an aerosol. Which cost US$7:50 and I just could not bring myself to pay it.  I hear prices are up in the States but Uruguay to our minds rooted in memories of Stateside prices circa 2023 seems excessive.  

One other gripe I have regards South American shopping carts while I’m having a gringo moment. Nowhere in any country do they have a cross bar at the bottom between the two rear wheels and it drives me nuts.  It means you can’t adopt the shoppers’ slouch with your arms folded on the handle with one foot raised on the cross bar.  Grrr.

Oh and salsa is $7:50 a jar. Forget it.

While Layne was watching the dryer in the underground parking lot I took the shopping back to GANNET2 in the open air section of the lot reserved for trucks and tall vehicles.  Some youngsters on lunch break were attracted to the foreign van. 

We had a long chat about van life and not paying rent which evolved into a discussion about the relative cost of living in Uruguay and the US. I am at pains in these discussions to point out we earn more in the States but costs are higher, and I also point out how migrants in low paying jobs hot bunk and live a dozen to an apartment to save money to send home. I always stress how much better their lives will be if they stay home near their families and support network. Then one of them brought up the cost of medical care in the US a subject that shocks foreigners used to free health care. It was an interesting conversation. 

Then we drove across town to a shop Layne found that sells lubricants. 

Usually I go to Ram/Jeep/Fiat  dealers to get the oils and filters I need but in Montevideo Zucchino the service center turned me away saying they don’t sell those products to the public. Uruguayan businesses will do anything not to make a sale. Weird. 

But Layne’s find was brilliant beyond my expectations. Not only did they have my rare 5W-20 weight oil but also my filter (used in Jeep Wranglers and thus widely available) but they also had the special OAT  (organic acid technology) coolant required for the aluminum Pentastar engine. I was delighted and prices were inline with what I’m used to, about ten bucks a liter.  I was happy.

Here’s the kicker: he also can make me a new air filter for me when I need one. The Promaster uses a special air filter I have not found for sale outside the US but this guy has a machine that molds air filters from any shape. Bring him the old one and he’ll make a replacement, he says.  Amazing.

Now I have a source for the filters, I’ll be back next year after our planned dusty drive through Patagonia.

I dropped Layne off in a rather attractive pedestrian zone to meet Julia and took off up the coast looking for somewhere to park. 

I happened upon a green space as I drove toward my favorite beach areas.

Note the light traffic, typical of Uruguay land of regular gas at $8:46 a gallon. 

Parque Rodó is named for a writer apparently, not for a soldier or an Admiral or a battle.  It’s the kind of place I would happily park for the night on my next visit to Uruguay.

Rusty loved it, walking indefatigably all over the place, and I was delighted to see him so energetic.  There was a statue in the park of course, but in this Uruguayan case celebrating… a teacher.  A woman teacher from 1938.

It’s a 100 acre  park and we only walked a bit of it but I’d like to go back.

Dogs are welcome but they also have an off leash area of no interest to my elderly frail misanthropic dog. 

Layne and Julia showed up in an Uber and we said good by. We had a 90 minute drive back to Colonia Valdense to get our rehabilitated cabin heater reinstalled. 

Don’t leave home without your maté gear (above). 

Beware farm equipment. On the freeway. 

We got to our wild camp spot a couple of miles from Adrian’s shop well before dark.

Scrambled eggs and matzoh that I brought back from the Key Largo Publix just last week. Flavors from home.