Out To Lunch

 We drove GANNET2 to Colonia, the tourist hub on the banks of the River Plate 45 minutes away and had fish for lunch with some young Floridians we met on the way.

Will wonders never cease, tourists wandering Uruguay in winter and I thought only we did such senseless things. Come to think of it Colonia in 60 degrees might make a nice break from Orlando in 90.

Rusty wanted no part of the day as he was entirely happy at home. I encouraged him to join us in the van and he got a worried look on his face and started to sidle away so I propped the kitchen door open and left him to guard our rental cottage, of which he hid a brilliant job.

The joy of the open road…I know it’s boring, not the Andes or the Amazon but I love driving and we haven’t been doing much so crossing what passes for Iowa at a smooth 55 mph seemed like a huge break from dealing with electrical parts and payment methods and all the rest of the shop related issues. 

The approach road to Colonia is lined with massive date palms because I assume some urban planner before World War Two had an idea above his station though I must say the effect all these years later (if my wild speculation is correct) is magnificent.

Traffic in Uruguay is light and in midweek in midwinter it is lighter than fairy dust: there’s no one around and unlike it that way. Even as we approached the capital of the department, the administrative hub of this part of the country there was hardly anyone to disturb my zen meditations on how much I enjoy this funny little country.  

Parking was available too even for a 21 foot behemoth in the Lilliputian local capital and the Fiat plane trees of fond memory are getting ever yellower leaves and thus a more wintery aspect. Locals dress as though they expect banishment to Siberia without warning. 

Granted I did put on a pair of jeans for the journey but temperatures were in the mid to upper 50s and snow never falls in this part of the world even in July which is mid winter.

We strolled to the highly rated seafood restaurant Layne had found and discovered to our horror it was closed permanently it looked like and behind those locked doors were the toilets we had had on our minds. We retreated back down the street to GANNET2 in the manner  of Napoleon abandoning Moscow and the devil take the hindmost.  

When we had had time to relax and regroup we found another fishy possibility not surprisingly this time in the waterfront a ten minute drive away through picturesque Colonia.

The portable toilet awaiting our hurried return:

The back up restaurant was on the waterfront, a very good place to be not only because of proximity to the source of lunch technically speaking but because also there was a park looking out across the waters of the River Plate:

This is the high speed Buquebus ferry to Buenos Aires 90 minutes across the river. The bureaucracy to board your van is crushingly complicated not least because we couldn’t get the website to work. 

The Portuguese claimed the birth shore of the river and built fortifications here to protect their property from Spanish claims. After independence the feud continued and in 1828 the British envoy Lord Ponsonby showed up and created Uruguay to prevent Argentina from owning both shores of this strategic waterway. Gunboat diplomacy, nation building, that all seemed to be so 19th century and now here we are again in 2026 arguing over waterways. 

We were waylaid by three pedestrians with luggage as we walked to the eatery. Weren’t we surprised to discover they are three enterprising youngsters pondering the possibilities of South America on a visit from Orlando. They joined us for lunch.

Meet Seth Tara and Chris entrepreneurs, runners and people who earn a living by organizing events. It boggles my mind you can make a living doing that but at least it’s a job whose parameters I vaguely understand. Most modern jobs involving computing sound like gobbledegook to me: Systems Analyst. IT Coordinator. Reliability Engineer. Support Coordinator. Organizing a marathon I understand more or less but I’d never have the wit to think of making a living at it. 

Aside from career advice which I found out too late but still fascinating we had fish for lunch not an easy task in a country devoted to grilled meat. Above my hake (a cod like fish I really like) with mashed potatoes and below Layne’s shrimp and octopus. 

Chris sitting patiently next to me had to suffer my photographic efforts peering at his fried hake salad. I’d like to try that next time we return and we plan to visit this place again. 

Layne found a locally brewed cider she liked while I had a Spanish draught beer from Galicia. 

And some excellent mussels to start.

Lunch was $80 so with Uruguayan prices to deal with you want yo eat something worthwhile when you eat out.

A worthwhile spot delightful I’m sure in a warm summer evening. 

After lunch and conversation the Floridians went  their way and very glad we had been to see them, they were good company. Layne went for a wander in an arts and craft hall created from a former railroad station while I took my camera for a walk. 

Signs such as these prohibiting campers reassure me as I feel much better about street camping in parks where these signs are not posted. My reading is if they didn’t want us there they know how to post prohibitions and one way we try to control costs in Uruguay is by free camping whenever possible. 

Layne is a fan of murals and she had heard about a spot in Colonia devoted to the art. With the sun declining and Rusty on my mind we stopped on our way out of town.

It was a wind free still afternoon and we sat together for a while overlooking the park.

“This is your park; Enjoy yourself.” 

It was a good day in the city and I was sorry Rusty didn’t want to come.

We stopped for gas on the way home and spent $175.00 filling a nearly empty tank. $8:25 a gallon could explain the empty highways. In Uruguay as in Argentina gas stations offer free hot water to fill your thermos for your maté drinking.

Plus if you have a diesel engine they dispense diesel exhaust fluid -urea in Spanish- from a pump. 

Rusty was as glad to see me as I was to see him. He made a good day better.

Paying The Bill

 I have been missing Key West lately and I don’t know why. I’ve been looking at Doug Bennett’s pictures from around the city and they have struck a chord. I suppose from time to time such feelings might be expected to come up and perhaps the cold crisp days of winter in Uruguay are reminding me of tropical pasts.

Life in Uruguay is pretty peaceful though not typically inexpensive as you might expect of a Latin American country. Indeed Uruguay is rated the most expensive country in South America, excluding France’s colony in the Guyanas, the most expensive of all. However a tourist in this rather small country of three and a half million people gets a quiet place to hang out far from threats of war and madding crowds. Europeans land here with their campers and immediately run for Peru and Bolivia to seek wild landscapes and indigenous folklore of which there is none here. Uruguay is placid, orderly, European and predictable. Except when it’s not.

A case in point has been our bureaucratic struggle to pay for the new Victron parts installed aboard GANNET2. The importers of the parts are the German family we first saw when we started looking to improve our system. TerraVentura sent us to Adrián to get the work done and I’m very glad they did as he is the most detail oriented mechanic I’ve seen in years. The question has been how to pay for the parts. In the US we’d proffer our credit card and that would be that but not in Uruguay. 

Our choices were back transfer or cash and the transactions are a in US dollars by the way. The Uruguayan peso has been fixed at 40 to the dollar for as long as anyone can remember but international trade even at this modest level is paid in dollars. Easy right? 

So Layne the banker decided to deploy Wise a money transfer app she had previously toyed with but never needed to use. So she entered the sum of $6981 and pressed send. Wise said no way this transfer looks suspicious, contact your bank. Very helpful. 

So we contacted our Key West Bank here the phone answerer asked if we had signed a transfer permission? No we haven’t. Oh well in that case drop by the bank and we can get that done in a minute. Except we’re in Uruguay. 

It did occur to me I may have to fly back to Key West to get this payment made. Perhaps that notion set me to thinking how nice it might be to go home even briefly. 

At this point we were slightly stymied and the German importers of Victron were starting to treat me as though I was about to go a runner. It seemed an odd way to run a business especially as we had decanted our modest little life into Adrián’s cottage which we rent for $20 a day. We had no easy way to run anywhere and the bill had to be paid. 

We had already paid an initial $2024 to Adrián by using Western Union money transfer but that method is horrible. It takes five days which allows the bank to hold your money and make interest off it. Then it’s up to the local office to collect the cash and pass it on to the customer. On his first approach the office at western Union had sufficient funds on hand to give Adrián $24. The other two thousand is inaccessible but in his account. He shrugs, he’s used to this nonsense. 

We still had the problem of paying $6981 for the assorted Victron parts not included in the Western Union transfer to Adrián. Dale cane to the rescue, a friend of Layne’s of long standing who introduced her to Wise. 

He found the solution instantly by offering to make the payment for us. And he did. However there was still a glitch believe it or not.

The transfer form left Dale no room to include the customer and invoice numbers and Victron is a massive multinational conglomerate and they lost Dale’s direct payment on our behalf to TerraVentura’s account. 

Predictably the Germans went ballistic in a very controlled monosyllabic frustrated way.  I wondered if somehow I wasn’t in fact trying to cheat them as I started to get Stockholm syndrome. This prolonged agony was absurd. It’s much more fun to watch green  parrots fly overhead. 

Messages flew ba k and forth as Victron tried yo find the missing deposit and I wished I could teleport myself to Fort Zachary beach and just go for a swim but I had no such luck; I just kept heaping logs on the fire and watching parrots. 

Eventually they located the money and I got actors message to that effect. I think the Terraventure Germans would have been delighted to teleport me to Siberia. However we still owed $2990 for the 110 volt inverter/charger that is supposedly in the pipeline. 

Fabulous do we still had to make one more payment. How to do that? 

We talked to Adrián and decided to pile up more cash in his already constipated Western Union account. We transferred the money and he can see it in the pipeline though it won’t arrive before Friday, and he assured TerraVentura the inverter is paid for. 

And so we wait for the inverter to arrive when Adrián will install it pretty rapidly. The wiring is ready to go and the space is set aside for it.  

We had the electrician in Brasilia attach an up down converter to our system to allow us to plug in to 220 volts as we wished. The first time I plugged it in it destroyed our charger. 

Adrián found the cause of the failure. The main plug was wired backwards in one final act of brilliance pursuing us from our ill fated repairs in Brasilia. In the photo below our original plug, the messed up one is on the left and the plug on the right is the new 220 volt charger installed and tested by Adrián. 

And one last thank you is owed to Uruguay for taking down our internet service. Apparently there is a problem affecting the neighborhood and no one seems to know why. We can’t use our Starlink as we run it through the inverter, the one that is on the way from California. Luckily we have a string phone signal around here.

So there you have it. Uruguay is very pleasant not without its flaws. Key West is merely a twinkle in my eye. I’d better go out another log on the fire.

Waiting For Our Part

 It happened when in Paraguay we tried to repair our broken shore power connection and we discovered the 110 volt battery charger which was part of the inverter was burned out. Chris the mechanic said he could order each part separately and then we found the charger half was no where to be found. So we had an inverter of no use to us. That’s because the Victron inverter includes the charger half. Keep on keeping on.

Now we wait for the inverter to arrive so the job can be finished. 

We’re expecting to get on the road by next weekend and we want to take a tour around Uruguay, a small country, to test everything and make sure we’re all present and correct before we cross the border to Argentina. 

With Gannet2 upgraded we’re thinking about doing one more circuit of South America before we cross back to Central America in 2028.  It seems a long way away but I guess the time will fly. 

This is the start of the second half of our tour of South America and we’re ready to roll. I hope the inverter gets here soon.

I went for a walk and saw some crappy roads because back roads get less attention even in wealthy Uruguay. 

And after my stroll in the winter sun I still maintain this countryside you could see in the Midwest. 

Oats for sale. 

The entrance to the workshop: 

The prediction is for Arctic cold this coming week. Fantastic, my favorite.

Winter weather here blows north from the southern latitudes, the world turned upside down.