Murals And Vino

In light of the fact we drove to the town of 25th of August to see murals painted on the streets as a public art project let us view murals to start today’s journey (which ends up immorally boozy so be warned). Let me say about the Florida Keys it’s well known they don’t have hills but if they did this could be a Key…memories of home:

I get the feeling this may not end well below, but once you know a French artist organized this permanent outdoor art show all is explained…

Leo Arti, a French artist, arrived in the sleepy town of 25 de agosto just an hour outside of Montevideo in 2006 to visit the train station. Enchanted by the peace and quiet of the town, a couple of years later she moved there and set up her workshop.

A fan of horse-riding and gaucho events, she painted a gaucho scene on the front of her atelier in 2012. Shortly after one of her pupils asked for help to reproduce a mural of her own work on her house-front.

Requests started pouring in from townspeople and businesses for her to paint murals on their houses and shops.

I found an article, headlined by this excerpt, online discussing the murals in much greater detail if you are interested:

https://www.guruguay.com/murals-25-de-agosto/

It was a cold wet breezy Sunday morning so we drove around at random after I walked Rusty and took some pictures. If you notice a total absence of humans we didn’t plan it that way, there were none.

Almost none…

We added our street parking spot to the iOverlander app for others following us though there is a campsite shown out of town.

Campsites in Uruguay are quite expensive, $30-$40 a night so we try to keep costs down by street camping in towns or in parks outside towns where overnight stops are not expressly prohibited. Our overnight stop Sunday was planned for a winery an hour outside Montevideo.

You can imagine this location in summer but we arrived in a drizzly afternoon and surprised the owner.

This is the first bottle tree I’ve seen in South America but I found out the owner didn’t a couple of months working and studying at a winery in Virginia so I guess he brought a few ideas back. 

Rusty liked it.  

You can get married here if you feel like it. I’d recommend in summer. 

Layne had sent a couple of WhatsApp messages but got no reply so we showed up deep out of season hoping for the best. 

They had been recommended to us by our Canadian friends Hugh and Sue with whom we had traveled in Central America and Argentina an the food got some good write ups online so Layne was ready…

Omar the owner demurred that he needed time so we said we’ll be happy to spend the night and have lunch tomorrow, so he said how about dinner? Great! 

Make yourselves at home he said as he lit the fire and offered his wine selection for our perusal on the honor system. They make a very nice fortified wine using his grandmother’s formula and it’s not too sweet. Highly recommended: 

Our favorite wine was a Merlot-Tannat blend light and very drinkable. Layne made lunch and we drank and ate and napped and read by the fire. 

And the hound was welcomed too. He was entirely sober and resisted the wine.  

We got a tour of the cellars set up by Omar’s family in 1954. The original wooden barrel:

At the turn of the century the government persuaded growers to tear up their vines and replant high quality grapes to upgrade wine production from mass produced table wines. So the whole country got together and replanted their vines. 

Smaller quantity but higher quality has worked for Omar. 

His grandfather built a 109,000 liter cement wine chamber, a giant swimming pool to ferment the grape crop, indelibly marked with red tannin from the grapes.  

Nowadays it’s a curiosity in the new world of fine wines promoted by Uruguay. 

Dinner was excellent. Lamb empanadas spiced with oregano:

Accompanied by all the wine you can drink…Chicken roulade with white wine:

Beef with roasted root vegetables and a wine reduction sauce: 

And a flan for dessert:

With dulce de leche on the side. Coffee and feet out by the fire for a very reasonable sixty bucks each. Plus Omar gave us a bottle of fortified wine as a present.

A hot shower and a free place to camp for the night rounded out this delightful stop. I like Uruguay.

25th Of August

What may appear at first glance to simply be a date is in fact upon closer inspection the name of a town, the town of murals. 

We spent the better part of the day unpacking our life in the cottage and returning our camping gear, clothes and kitchen supplies to their place aboard GANNET2.

He knew something was up spelling nothing good for him. I wish we could have stayed longer for him.

We filled the water tank with potable well water as one of the jobs, along with emptying the porta potty into the toilet, taking hot showers and cleaning out the fireplace. By 3:30 we were done except for paying the bill and saying goodbye. And that was that.

The Spanish travelers were getting frantic as their gas system was resisting repairs  but Adrián was working on some ideas. They aren’t used to having to wait to get things done  and staying an extra day was stressing them out. We got driving. 

We passed a monument to a Uruguayan motorcycling so that merited a momentary pause:

If you want to know if 53 degrees feels cold ask the horse in its blanket:

Saturday afternoon is the perfect time to hold up traffic: 

Mind you there aren’t many cars on the road in Uruguay, land of expensive fuel.

Our 90 minute earth shattering journey on Google:

 The 25th of August 1825 was the day Uruguay declared independence and made it stick. Their first attempt was in 1811, one more Latin American country trying to take advantage of Napoleon’s invasion and take over of Spain but Portugal and Spain each wanted it. Britain brokered a deal in 1828 creating a separate state with the Treaty of Montevideo. And this tiny town is named for that day.

It’s an unremarkable speck is 25th of August  and aside from the murals that we shall photograph today there is nothing here.

Side streets are dirt. 

José Gervasio Artigas, 1764-1850, fought for Argentine independence to start with and then broke with Buenos Aires to create the nucleus of an independent Uruguay until driven into exile in 1816 and he stayed in Paraguay until his death. These days he is considered a founding hero of the independent state of Uruguay ultimately created in 1828. 

After this excitement we plan a winery visit and then we move on to check out, briefly, the capital. More driving to come.

Spanish Travelers

 I am feeling recovered and we have been packing. We are both still coughing a bit but energy levels are up. We are hoping to be on the road by Saturday afternoon, planning a 90 minute meander to a winery campground discovered by Layne during her escape preparations. It is past time for a change of scenery as I do not appear to be developing pneumonia and I am very pleased about that.

A Spanish couple showed up yesterday needing Adrián’s help to fix their propane system. They had to empty their tank to ship from Europe and when they tried to refill it they got dime dirt if airlock. Propane systems are different all over the world and complicated to refill as all have different fittings. It’s why GANNET2 has no propane and is all electric in our kitchen.

We had them over for wine and talk and they did not leave before midnight which may impact our ability to get going…but they are an interesting couple  of travelers. They are part time retired and have taken their MAN 4x4 van all over Europe from Iceland to Morocco and arrived in Montevideo three days ago aiming for warmer climes in Brazil. In December they fly back to Valencia to work for a year leaving the van with Adrián while they are gone. It was good to talk with fellow travelers and we learned about RVing in Europe, something we will consider after Rusty goes to his reward. 

He knows something is up but I hope it’s separation anxiety from the house not from us. I figure he must realize by now he is inseparable from us. We are anxious to see how he does when we are back in vanlife mode, and we will be making sure he is as rested as he needs to be as we drive.  There is no doubt now he is old and that has to be one of our priorities. Meanwhile stuff gets sorted and stowed or sorted and trashed. Minimalism is life. Well, not too minimal says the intrepid explorer with microwave.

Hospital

I went to the hospital yesterday. 

It cost $88 and took three hours, most of that time spent waiting and I came away knowing I don’t have pneumonia -yet- but if I’m not healing properly by Monday I need to go back and start antibiotic treatment. Peachy.

There are no private practice doctors in town.  In Uruguay medicine like education is free to all and as you can see in this town the hospital though small is as clean and modern as you could wish. 

They got a bit confused when presented with an actual paying customer but they took my passport and had a consultation and I paid by credit card at the cashier’s window and that was that.  The staff, including the doctor looked to be in their 20s and 30s while the customers appeared to be more our age.

While we sat waiting one older man sat down a few seats away watching something on his phone. Layne was reading our paper copy of The Lonely Planet and I was reading a Longmire mystery on my phone and from time to time we would exchange a remark in English of course, usually about some attraction she had located.

And each time he turned up the volume on his game show, and I mean LOUD. At first I thought he was deaf but it eventually occurred to me we were staining the purity of the Uruguayan ambience. Weird.  It was a relief when they released his wife and they tottered out of the hospital with him throwing a glowering glance at me as he passed. We could mutter again. Being foreign is not always sexy  in case you were wondering. But there again Colonia Valdense is a small farming town where not many travelers are seen. Most people are cheerfully curious, or shy and withdrawn, but some find us rubbing at their inner insecurities. 

She spoke Spanish with us but the doctor was cheerful and efficient telling me she is seeing a lot of patients with my symptoms of heavy coughing, mucus and what I can best describe as malaise. However my blood pressure was spot on 130/70 my lungs are clear and I have no physical pain in my rib cage or back so she was happy about that.

Obviously you can’t photograph people in these environments but my wife did kindly catch me taking 40 winks as I waited. Everyone else was dressed for central heat but I was so cold I was dressed for an Arctic expedition. I really was forced to conclude I am not well. I got pills and stuff on a prescription which required a brief stop at the pharmacy on our way home.

For those in the medical profession the pills taken three times a day are a tongue twister.

Anyway by Monday either I will be ready to drive to Montevideo or back to the hospital for increasingly fierce medicine. If I get atypical (“walking”) pneumonia I’m going to write someone a pretty severe note. Fate needs to back off. I slept much better last night with much less coughing but I am growing weary of feeling better one day and feeling like crap for the next two so I’m reserving judgement.

All this to say if you get sick on the road, you get treated you move on no big deal. I am annoyed at myself for still being stuck here, but at this point GANNET2 has been under the knife, Rusty nearly died, Layne has been in bed with this searing miserable cough so I guess it’s just my turn.  

I need Celia to come caroling and singing “On the road again… “as I’ve almost forgotten what it is to be a nomad. Then I need to get Layne to bring the invalid a nice cup of tea and to fluff his pillows. There’s nothing more heart wrenching, or needy, than a grown man at death’s door.

Packing

 We are getting ourselves in order to leave. We are still coughing and spluttering so we are moving slowly but we are making progress. I’ll post an update when there is something to say, perhaps arriving somewhere new. Seeing something new. That would be fun. Cheers.

A couple of oldies but goodies.  

Farmacia

 The rule in Latin America if you don’t feel well is to see a pharmacist. If you’ve been coughing and spluttering for a week, feeling congested and unable to sleep you don’t go to the doctor. Gringo tourists go to the doctor but they are not used to the local way of doing things.

Our first attempt at seeking powerful medicine didn’t go    well    last     Tuesday.  Layne came out shaking her head saying she didn’t get a good hit off the pharmacist, she didn’t seem like a bright spark. Sure enough we took the powders she sold us, felt better for a day and relapsed.

Friday I was too sick to drive, which tells you how ill I felt as I will drive anywhere anytime. Saturday we tried a different pharmacy and the young woman, possibly my granddaughter if I had one, handed us spluttering old timers a box for our “gripa.”

We went home and I gingerly drank my 20 milliliters of pink goop which tasted of flavorless syrup  and made my tongue feel numb, and yet miraculously I slept last night, quite deeply too, which is why this post is appearing late in the morning.

It is cold outside, winter cold, every day even under the sun the air is cold, no autumnal relief.  Maria José is back from Argentina, Adrián was smiling this morning as he took a load of firewood into his house and we were supposed to have been taking off today. If the young pharmacist got it right we want to be driving away by Tuesday. Rusty loves it here so he will be disappointed I fear but we will do our best for him on the road to Bolivia.  

He stayed out till ten last night refusing to come in enjoying the cold night air. I need a fur coat. I’ve graduated from my woolen Mexican poncho to a puffy jacket and gloves. The chill is real and we need to get north.