Packing Up

 Rusty looked at me rather balefully last night as I stuffed pill after pill into him and I told him, in vain I think, that they are for his own good. 

The vet gave him a check up Friday morning after he hobbled into the office on three and a half legs, and got his injured front leg shaved.  My poor patched dog.

When Fran jumped him he got some bruising on his lung but it’s decreasing according to the vet who stuck a stethoscope on him,  and the several bites he got in his leg are healing and none of them got him in the elbow joint, so that was lucky. Rusty the wonder dog is almost back to his usual self after all the trauma of the attack.

It rained Friday in Caacupé so the temperature dropped from the usual 100 degrees to the mid 70s, at least for a while. Layne has made friends with a German visitor who is staying in an apartment at the Little Bavaria campground and I delivered them to a Swiss restaurant for lunch. They had several capirinhas, sugar cane alcohol drinks resembling mojitos popular in Brazil and it seems in Paraguay which they used to wash down a Swiss lunch, steak with mushroom sauce and spaetzle:

Rusty and I hung out at the damp campground waiting for the call to pick them up. My lunch was a local version of an empanada which Layne doesn’t like as she hates raisins a popular Paraguayan ingredient in their meat pies.

When we drove back to the restaurant I was pleased to see Rusty take an interest and wander slowly around. He met a local dog which freaked me out but he just said hello and moved on as usual.  I the overthinker was all sentimental imagining how it might be after he dies but Rusty just got on with living. I’ve never seen him traumatized as he was after Fran attacked him. I should have had a capirinha to slow my brain down: 

The drive to the restaurant was Paraguayan, lots of greenery, winding rolling road and a few roadside attractions.

The country club isn’t what you think. It’s more like a water park in a country with no access to the sea so rivers and fresh water holes are recreation centers.  

I’m not sure which saint this is but usually St Francis is depicted as an animal lover though not usually with sheep. I consider Saint  Francis of Assisi as the second or third most famous Umbrian after me and possibly even St Valentine whose holiday you recently celebrated. 

Not sure what this was about, below, but I never had to invoke the deity this road was that smooth. 

And there was the billboard to remind us that the only real family is the traditional version. Which leads me to wonder if Paraguay is less socially rigid than I imagined. “We believe in original design; the family as god created it.” So I guess there are Paraguayans who are not in agreement. This country surprises sometimes. 

And then there is Chipa (pro: “cheaper”) which is a baked ring of something that tastes like corn bread with dill, crunchy on the outside and soft on the inside. Sold warm at the roadside for 75 cents (five thousand guaraní) each.  I of course like them:

We are planning to drive 90 minutes on Saturday to visit a tourist city called Villarica as we are both looking forward to being actual tourists for a bit. Tonight Mark the English van dweller has a house warming for his new cabin as he moves out of his van into his $20,000 400 square foot brand new home surrounded by a fence to keep the aggressive Fran contained. I’ll write about that after we have the barbecue tonight. Chipa for sale in the baskets under the blue cloths: 

Sunday we are planning to leave and pay the capital of Asunción a visit. After that we’ll drive across Paraguay to Encarnación a river resort on the border with Argentina. We want to drive south to get to cooler temperatures and if we can we’d like to spend a little less time on things mechanical. This transformation of GANNET2 has taken a lot of energy but sleeping all night in 12 volt low energy air conditioning and waking with fully half charged batteries is so worth it. Sleeping comfortably in oppressive heat and not having to worry about energy consumption is liberating. Not to mention the 860 watts of solar panels which we’ve relied on  to keep our batteries charged day after day. Unlimited wild camping seems attainable now even with all our electrical  demands. 

Winter in Paraguay is apparently quite livable with temperatures in the 50s in July with no rain. We might have to come back and on our way to or from Bolivia and Brazil later this year.