Saying Goodbye to the Last of the Family and Heading to Bariloche, Argentina

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Joey, Aaron, Aldo, and I did visit another winery on Friday and it was a really fun time as always. We went back to Mr. Hugo and he gave us a discount because we were repeat customers, which was really nice. It wasn’t quite the same not having the Dutchies with us but since it was just the guys it was a different dynamic and certainly still a great time. We started out going to the farthest winery around and it was a 10K ride right off the bat. I was feeling good, not hung over, but still after sitting on a bus for an hour and then hopping on a bike for a 10K ride I was a little winded. Everyone admitted that they were feeling the same way so I didn’t feel so bad about myself. We tasted a few wines at the first place and they were really good, the owners of this winery were French and fell in love with Mendoza and opened the winery in 1998. We learned about the only white grapes from the Mendoza region called torrontes and the white wine was really good which was surprising because I am not always the biggest fan of white wines. The second place we rode to be pretty ritzy and to tell you the truth not all that great. The service was pretty subpar and the wines themselves weren’t anything to write home about. We got out of there as quickly as we could because it was getting late and we still wanted to hit up one more winery on the way back to Mr. Hugo. The last winery was some of the best wine I’ve had. We tried four wines and the final wine was a really sweet wine that tasted almost like a port or a sherry. This winery was the oldest in Mendoza which meant to me that it was good stuff and they knew what they were doing. We also learned that the only place in the whole world where this wine is imported to other than Mendoza is, as the tour guide put it “a place in the United States that you may not have heard of, a state called Michigan”. I was blown away! I have the flyer for the place and am going to figure out where I can get my hands on some of this wine when I get back to the states. I bought a bottle of the sweet wine because it was unlike any I’d ever tried before and was really excited to get it back to the hostel and drink some of it (little did I know that being as drunk as I was I would leave the bottle of the wine on the bus we took from the winery because we missed our original stop and had to get off quickly and I also had to pee so bad I couldn’t event think, so ya that was a solid purchase down the drain, way to go Tom). Meanwhile, as we were drinking wine, the tire on Joey’s bike had gone flat and he had to ride about 1000 meters to another winery to call Mr. Hugo who promptly came out and switched out his bike for him. After the final winery we went to a little outdoor beer garden with a rustic kitchen and some delicious beer. We all had a beer and talked about a bunch of stuff, girls, travelling, wine, our respective cities, and had two pizzas and relaxed. It was a really nice afternoon. We got back to Mr. Hugo and had some more free wine; we sat with three Aussie girls named Alex, Kate, and Emily. They were pretty cute and seemed really fun so we sat and chatted with them for a while and then hopped back on our bus to Mendoza. The girls were going to a free tequila party at their hostel that night and we explained how we had been to such a party on Monday and it did us all in. nevertheless we succumbed to the peer pressure, got ready back at our hostel and went to theirs to meet up with them. We were already kind of buzzed up and got even more drunk when the free tequila started flowing. They were just pouring it in people’s mouths; it was a real live shit show again however this time I didn’t get as drunk, in fact none of us did because we learned our lesson the last time! We all made it home at some point that night and slept until the lady from the hostel came to wake us up for checkout.

April 16th

Brett bought us bus tickets for Saturday night to leave Mendoza and head to Bariloche which is a city in south western Argentina. It’s a lot colder down there but I wanted to see the south of the country and also Joey lived in Bariloche so he knows the place and was really excited to go back there as well. He got a bus ticket for a little later than us and will arrive about four hours after we do. Today we decided to have lunch together, Aaron, Aldo, Joey, Brett, and myself. We went to a restaurant down the street and all decided to have some beers since it was Saturday afternoon and it was our last day. We drank a few beers and we ran into two British guys from the hostel party the night before and invited them to join us for a beer. They told us that they were having some money problems as one of them lost his credit card and coincidentally the other had to pay for everything for the both of them so his card was maxed out at the moment. I told them not to worry and we’d buy them a beer since I know it was like to not have any money and be in need of an alcoholic beverage. We bullshitted for a while at lunch and then I went to the Adidas store and bought some new shoes as well as a sweet track jacket that is the colors of the Dutch football team. I figured my new Dutch friends would appreciate that one. After that we went back to the hostel where we were keeping our things until the time we left and played a lot of foosball and drank more beers. We were there for a few hours hanging out and joking around and then we left the hostel around 17.00 to go to a bar nearby as there was a big soccer game on: Barca played Real Madrid. We got some more pitchers of beer and sat back and relaxed to watch the game. We were all pretty fucked up by the time we got out of the bar, the game ended in a 1-1 tie, fucking soccer. We went back to the hostel and organized our things and then we went to McDonalds for dinner which sounded great since we were drunk and wanted some greasy food! After we ate we said goodbye to Aaron who we’ll see in Buenos Aires but it was still crazy and pretty tough since we’d been travelling with him for a little over two weeks. We walked back to the hostel and got our things together and then said goodbye to Aldo who again we’d been travelling with for almost the same amount of time. He said that whenever we come to Paris we can stay in his flat for free and we were really appreciative of that. I gave him a big hug and told him we’d keep in touch. It was a melancholy night to say the least but all good things must come to an end at some point and when travelling these things are bound to happen. We took a taxi to the bus station but since Brett bought the tickets online we had to print them off. We went to two different Andesmar (the bus company) offices but none of them would print them for us so we had to go to an internet café in the bus station to do it. We made the bus on time thank god and settled into our seats for an 18 hour ride. We slept most of the night but as always with the bus it’s not the best sleep a man can have. We woke up this morning and they served us breakfast, I slept some more after that and just about an hour ago we played a game of bingo on the bus that was organized by the host guy who gives you the food and beverages. The point of the game was that you had to not get the squares in a row or horizontal but to fill all the squares on the 16 square tickets. Guess who won? Yours truly, Mr. Thomas Wellington Carr. I won a bottle of white wine! It was hilarious, the bus gave me a round of applause, Brett and I couldn’t stop laughing. We’re about an hour out from “The Loche” as Brett and I have been calling it or Bariloche as the rest of the world calls it so I am going to wrap this up and talk to ya’ll later on. I’ll let you know how it is once we arrive, T. Carr out.

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Comments

[Rick]

Wine
Tommy, let me know the name of that bottle of wine from Mendoza. If anyone can find it, it's the guys at Cloverleaf in Royal Oak. If they can't, the guys at Holiday Market certainly can. I'll make sure I locate some for you before you get back. Send me the name and the pic of that flyer if you can. Love you Tom. Talk to you soon.