Rusty Is Alive

It was touch and go but he is eating and functioning if not back to his old self.  He walks with a wobble and occasionally sits down abruptly when he loses his balance. His blood test results came back in the normal range and the vet says he is on the path to recovery.  

He is alert and after he was checked out he led me on a walk up the street like he always has sniffing and checking stuff out. I really thought it was curtains for him for a few days but he has recovered sufficiently we hope to resume our travels with him in a few weeks.

There is no getting away from the fact that he is old and he could relapse at any time or have another stroke but he is alive and I love having him around and watching him devour a chicken breast like he hadn’t eaten for three days (because he hadn’t).

We plan to wait a couple of weeks and see how he’s doing.  If he is able to travel we’ll take off, if not we’ll pause longer. We aren’t going to stop being nomads but we are going to take care of our most vulnerable family member. No one gets left behind.

Colonia Valdense, Uruguay. 

Rusty Had A Stroke

 The vet said she couldn’t seen any external signs of a severe blow to the head so it seems likely he had some kind of stroke or interruption of blood flow. She noted he also send have some sort of tic in his left eye as well.

It turns out last night’s shenanigans with Rusty wandering outdoors may have been his response to not feeling well. I got him into the house around five in the morning and he could barely stand, stumbling like he was drunk. I stayed up with him as he laid out on his bed breathing heavily, and I was pretty wrecked as he looked like he was dying. Layne took over later and by morning he was slightly better and drank some milk. I was dreading taking him to the vet as I have no desire to kill him but Maria-Jose stuffed us in her car and got us there in five minutes. She would be an excellent ambulance driver. 

The upshot was that he should slowly improve and to that end he gets two pills and a mouthful of vitamins every day and a follow up visit Monday afternoon. All that for less than $25 for the vet and $35 for the meds.

He staggered getting back to the car but he hates being carried and once aboard María-José’s car he seemed to perk up. I was just delighted the vet  thought he could heal over time. 

He was delighted to be home and took off with his funny staggering gait like he’s drunk but he only fell down when he tried to sit. Once down he got his first dose of medications.

And then he stretched out to sleep after a long emotional morning. He slept a lot which is the best thing apparently. He ate some steak for dinner and drank done milk and slept some more. We are trying to figure out our future plans but what Rusty needs will guide us. Currently he needs rest.   Going to sleep with him snoring heavily is a pleasure I cannot take for granted any more.

My Beloved Dog

 There are days when Rusty really gets up my nose. I can’t say I hate him because I don’t but some days I hate the hold he has on my heart. 

At 4:30 this morning he went outside as I sat up, insomnia brought on by an uncomfortable bed and prepared to summarize yesterday’s inverter installation. An hour later (mostly spent reading as I am old and lazy) I realized he was still outside on a cold damp morning. Panic ensued and I went looking for him through the garden  and he was nowhere to be found. I went out in the road shivering in the damp cold morning worried the one car an hour may have got him or a wild animal might have dragged him off, in my panic forgetting he’s the meanest sonofabitch in the valley. My wandering woke Adrián himself subject to insomnia but he also has alarm cameras which probably alerted him to the prowler.  The love of my life (the other one) was nowhere to be found…until Adrián’s headlights illuminated my dog sitting in the long grass of the neighbors field not twenty yards from the warmth and comfort of the cottage we are renting. He looked cute and alert. “What’s up guys? Have you lost something?” Bloody dog; I nearly had a heart attack.

I hugged Adrián and went back to the fire to warm up and compose myself and try to draw back the threads of yesterday’s progress. Inverter installed minus a couple of wire extensions that need to be delivered. 

Maria Jose showed Robert our Florida neighbor in his Toyota camper truck, how she keeps her maté straw clear when she is drinking the foul stuff.

There’s no accounting for taste but Robert, an otherwise normal American loves the stuff but his straw (“bombilla”) gets clogged. She has a trick straw to clear blockages.

Plus she drinks rough cut maté where Robert prefers the finer cut which is more likely to clog she says.  I like my black tea bags thanks with stevia and milk and I think bitter Yerba Maté is for the birds.

It’s an Argentine habit widely enjoyed in Uruguay and southern Brazil. You will find hot water dispensers at gas stations where you can refill your Thermos on a road trip.

Then you add the hot water to your maté (cup) and suck up the bitter grassy flavored water and share the straw. I observe native customs but I don’t necessarily enjoy them. They sell the stuff by the ton and in Uruguay decent coffee is hard to find but maté is everywhere. 

You can get flavored maté too or sweetened but for hardcore drinkers that’s bogus. Ginger flavored (“ you will feel good” is the slogan on this six dollar bag):

Anyway the inverter should be done today. Next week we have a few more small jobs to wrap up and off we go, starting with a tour of Uruguay in winter warmed by our new heater. Can’t wait. Rusty will be annoyed but after this morning he deserves it. Well, not really but what a scare.

Adrián my hero, master mechanic and dog finder extraordinaire. 

Energy Independence

 We filled the tank from close to empty before we drove to the caves earlier this week and we spent $175. At $8:25 a gallon car travel in Uruguay is a privilege and light traffic on the highways shows the effect of these prices.

Layne was looking into rental prices for places close to the water just in case we have to stop one day in the future at least for a while as Rusty is getting old, and she found places to rent between $600 and $1200 a month just as a guide, without further investigation. Certainly not US prices for prime waterfront rentals,

Our  $3,000 inverter/charger has arrived and I expect it will be installed by the end of today, Friday. With this piece onboard GANNET2, our 16 mpg home will be electrically speaking, whole. There are a few more jobs we need to get done before we leave but the electronic transformation of our house is complete.

Give us a moderately sunny day and we can generate all the electricity we need and if we don’t use our Dometic air conditioner all night at 21 amps per hour we can generate more than we need to live in our tiny suburban house on wheels with electric cooking Starlink and charging our devices all day long. 

I wonder how much this system will cost in a year after all the disruptions of war in the Middle East and riots in Bolivia which has immense poverty and huge lithium mines. The cost of fuel one can mitigate slightly as we don’t have to move, we aren’t commuting, the cost of rent we can ease by free camping, and so forth. The anxiety of a well fed world  eager to tear itself apart to feel the pain of our ancestors a hundred years ago leaves me utterly baffled.  We seem to be led by a class of human beings completely out of touch with the aspirations of the least among us, a home, a family and some predictability in our community.

Robert drove up in his Toyota Land Cruiser with a Montana tag on the front. Montana makes international travel easy with permanent registration and easy residence requirements such that when we met a camper ostensibly from Montana we assume (I know) they aren’t even Americans. Robert on the other hand lived just off Flagler Avenue years ago and built a company in Key West close by the Conch Train roundhouse. Imagine that.

He got the opportunity to buy a custom built four wheel drive camper and has been on the road for eight years based out of St Petersburg. He is ambling slowly south aiming for Buenos Aires next after he gets some work done on the camper.

He has so much in common with us as far as traveling goes it is surprising and also reaffirming. He likes to fly fish and watch birds which we don’t but he likes to eat out and study cultures as he travels which we do. I told the story of our Andean breakdown  last year:

And he added his own tale of woe breaking a universal joint on a dirt track high in Peru and spending three days stuck waiting for the tow truck to arrive which itself sank in the mud and had to be dug out for hours before they could drag the Land Cruiser on the bed. Our drive downhill to Arequipa was eight hours of main road where Robert had to negotiate single lane tracks and narrow tunnels which just barely accommodated the tow truck and load. 

As you might imagine the encounter has raised the morale of Team Lost. We have had dinner together and gone shopping and sat around drinking the national cocktail of Argentina. It sounds gross but don’t knock it till you’ve tried it:

Layne has been looking at the map and has discovered an Indian Summer in Paraguay, land of 70 degree days which sounds a lot warmer than coastal Uruguay and a lot cooler than 100 degree summer days all with cheaper gasoline. We may make a stop there on our way to the Pacific Coast. It is nice to think of warmer days than 50 frigid degrees and north winds here, gray skies and a dawn that shows up barely at 8 am. I took this picture at 7:22 this morning: 

People who hate daylight saving need to spend some time in Uruguay in winter where it doesn’t get light till 8am. I find it weird. I need to ask Robert what he thinks and that should provoke a discussion which will be bound to be interesting. 

Mid 40s by night and mid 50s by day but it feels a lot colder.  

Feeding the insatiable beast to survive:

Gratuitous Rusty pictures:

Happy as a clam, delighting in the cold, he prefers the cold outdoors to his bed near, but not too near, the fire.  

Tomorrow

Tomorrow we are assured the inverter/charger will be delivered here. I have seen a photograph of the part ostensibly in Uruguay. 

Yesterday I woke up before dawn and went outside to pick up some logs to feed the slumbering fire, an endless repetitive task, and going myself in a gray half light reflected by dripping fog and a spectral frigid stillness that put me mid winter somewhere not very nice. Under sunny skies even when cold this place is quite pleasant.

But yesterday was the day to stay abed. Adrián has been building two Mercedes Sprinters for two different customers but he needs parts too from TerraVentura the Victron importers as he is waiting for batteries and solar panels.

And yesterday a new Fiat Ducato, the van on which the Promaster is based also arrived ready to be turned into a camper. Adrián has a business we are just a couple of retirees living well until our build can be finished.

It’s just a bit weird not really knowing what’s going on or why the delays or where our $3,000 box is actually located.  We have more than two months left on our permission to stay in Uruguay, its winter so it’s not like we’re missing prime touring season or anything but I’d rather be sitting by the fire knowing GANNET2 is finished, tested and ready to go. Being stuck on TerraVentura’s mysterious schedule has been just a little odd, that’s all. But the waiting seems likely to be over, and I’m delighted they have got what we need for us. 

I think Rusty would be delighted to end his days here, as he has made this 

his domain. When it’s cold and the front door is closed he bangs on it with his head, the metal reverberating like a drum and one of us has to get up to let him in.

Adrián’s cats have got the measure of the old dog stalking past just far enough away that the struggle to get up isn’t worth the effort especially as he knows they will outpace him easily so he glares at them from the comfort of his stretched out resting place in front of the cottage.

They ignore him studiously as they go about their business in and out of the workshop.

I’m up to volume twenty  four of the Longmire novels, I’m struggling to read the ghastly details of the Terror of the French Revolution while I’m eyeing a novel by Brazilian Jorge Amado, vaguely relevant, as my next read.  I’m expecting to see out this week at least, still here. But we are starting to think about how we are going to get back into our home on wheels. 

It could be worse I suppose but like Mr Micawber I’m just waiting for something to show up. It’s looking good about now.

Palatial Caves Road Trip

Sunday was going to be a road trip day no matter what and we hesitated only briefly as light drizzle descended on central Uruguay. Yesterday started out raw and wintery with cold damp air and flat gray light and all that made a trip anywhere unappealing.

On the other hand GANNET2 cane from the factory with a powerful cabin heater, a byproduct of our V6 engine, the one that burns $8:25 of regular gas every 15 miles or so.  It was not going to be a cheap day trip, nothing is in Uruguay, but we had the tools to cope with the weather. We got on the road, two hours north to a set of caves.  

We invited Rusty fully expecting him to decline and he paused and thought about it, we’ve left him behind twice already on shopping trips always at his request and I could see him debating whether or not this time…but yo my amazement and joy he jumped in the van preferring to suffer with us than luxuriate alone. He loves living in a house. The day did not look promising.

We left at eleven and drove trough some drizzle on largely empty roads. As a rule traffic is very light on Uruguayan highways and on a cold damp Sunday morning the small unremarkable towns we drove through looked deserted.

Backwoods Uruguay is marked by poverty.  This country of three and a half million is said to be the wealthiest per capita in South America but away from the beaches and the playgrounds of the elite in Punta del Este there’s lots of tin roofed, trash lined, rusty car poverty.  

I’m sure a donkey powered peasant in Mexico would consider himself lucky to be poor in Uruguay but it is a little startling to a gringo in a mobile home. Had we an inverter our empanadas for lunch would have been warm but even cold they weren’t bad  as imma sucker for a meat pie. Lacking rest areas or pull puts we improvised and found a flat area for Rusty to enjoy the grass as we ate. 

Not Iowa corn fields though they could be. 

I hoped he wasn’t regretting his decision to spend the day with us instead of sprawling in the grass in front of the cottage.  

It was a funny old day in the road with no bed in the car, no 110 volt electricity or any of our usual supplies. We were traveling in a car and not in our home.

This is not a country endowed with much in the way of natural wonders as you can see. Personally I love a cornfield as much as the next diner but I concede that if the United States consisted solely of amber waves of grain I might get tired of road tripping. Uruguay had to make the most of what it’s got.

These natural oddities were discovered in the late 1860s  on private land. In the 1930s the government bought about 42 acres of the land and set it aside as a municipal park. In 2014 it was turned into a national monument amid much fanfare apparently.

I get the feeling being president of Uruguay is akin to being the mayor of a small town. This isn’t a country of much political drama, they have elections between more or less left and right wing parties but everything bumbles along without drama in between votes. It’s quite refreshing. So when they have a set of modest little canes not only are they worthy of being protected but everyone gets in for free. Education is totally free in Uruguay. (Yes I know it all gets paid with taxes but everyone benefits from as much schooling as they want). 

Six of us showed up for the two ovlovknyour and got a video presentation to start explaining how the caves were formed. Fabian the guide looked relieved when we said we understood Spanish. There is a display of local rocks.

I was fascinated by two and a half million year old piece of petrified wood:

And an ancient bee honeycomb:

We walked a half mile to the caves down an avenue lined with non native trees. Apparently this was the choice a hundred years ago to emulate the “European style” of formal gardens. Nowadays they are trying to add native plants.

No one in the group spoke to us or each other  for the 90 minutes we were together. They avoided eye contact and acted as though alone. I’ve got used to Uruguayan stand offishness possibly a product of shyness and I noticed they didn’t exclude us so much as they ignored each other, in Argentina we’d have all exchanged life histories but this is close to Argentina, and similar in many cultural ways but not at all as friendly, so there it is.

There was a myth attached to these caves  that a prince and princess escaping the Spanish holes here had made it their palace, hence the name The Caves of the Palace, but really it’s a matter of rising seas flooding the area millions of years ago.

The waters receded leaving behind silt that got compressed unevenly and rain water washed out the loose silt leaving columns of compressed blocks. I know it’s not as much fun as princesses on the lam but there it is.

A Brazilian geologist penetrated more than three hundred and fifty feet into the cave system and provedcyonevrryinesxsatidfaction that it is the action of rainwater and not subterranean streams that erodes the soil leaving the compressed pillars. 

Apparently the cars are five hundred yards wide and at least 150 deep and not all of it is exposed yet; but the action of time has also eroded some of the exposed  aves down to nubs of rock.

Fabian our guide, a nice guy got a tip from us at the end, gringo style. 

Faced with a two hour ride home we got on with it and as dogs aren’t allowed inside Rusty had to sit out the tour aboard GANNET2 so he got a walk afterwards. 

It was a pleasant diversion and got us out of the house. 

We stopped on the way home to pick up some critical supplies.

It was not an exciting drive home but we arrived at dusk.  Driving at night in Uruguay isn’t a problem as roads are well marked and there aren’t animals or drunks loose in the dark. At least not that I’ve seen. 

Rusty was ready to get home, eat a large dinner and pass out. I hope he judged it a good day; we did.