Real Travel
8 - 9 October, Ian
Our problems over the last two days began on
Friday night. In the notes at the end of
Prime
Obsession it is claimed - without proof or
explanation - that if you take a sequence of random numbers between 0 and 1 the
expectation of how many terms are needed before their cumulative sum exceeds 1
is e
(the exponential base, which is 2.7 and change). I couldn't immediately see why
this would be the case. Over and above this, shortly before we turned in I'd
had to club a cockroach to death as it scuttled up the wall by the bed and I was
also a little disturbed by an unidentified animal sound coming from within one
of the wooden chairs. So the thought of the bugs made me too uneasy to sleep
and the number thing gave me something to think about. By the small hours I had
figured out, both heuristically and formulaically, why the answer is
e -
it's a satisfying result but in the morning I was very sleepy and when Paula
tried to get us up at 6:00 for our journey to Argentina I begged another hour in
bed and we finally set off just after
8:00.
Our departure from Santiago went without difficulty, even though all of the roads on the outskirts of the city are being ripped up as part of a highway overhaul and so the road markings and signs are mostly missing or misleading. By mid-morning we were speeding through the Chilean countryside. The land here is more verdant than any we've seen since South Africa (where they irrigate the land so much that they risk depleting their sources of water) but the lush greens form the background to a unique preponderance of yellows, oranges and browns amongst the scrub bushes and wildflowers. It's all extremely pretty, in the Impressionist style. We turned off the main highway onto a straight single lane road, which was planted on both sides with vines. The most common mode of transport here was the horse and every rider wore a sombrero and a poncho; they seemed unfazed by the occasional cars, all of which we're travelling even more quickly than those on the motorway. As lunchtime approached we had turned towards the snow-capped Andes, which formed a beautiful and dramatic backdrop to the continuing expanses of rolling hills and vineyards and the cloudless blue sky; intense sun sparkled off ice wherever it rose to the surface of the snow.
The road signs continued to be surprisingly infrequent, and although we had no good maps there were many geographical clues to guide us, one of the most obvious of which was that we had to rise through the mountains. As we gained more height it began to seem reminiscent of a ski resort. And then, bizarrely, it was a ski resort, with pistes and skiers to the side of the road and ski lifts passing overhead. So far so good.
We reached the first border post and, after a short queue, passed through without incident. The queues really backed up in the long mountain tunnels, where the multi-axle lorries towered to within a foot or so of the roof on the nearside and seemed to have difficulty making the tighter bends. It would have been a bad place to be claustrophobic. At times when we were at a standstill a noise exactly like standing underneath an aeroplane with its jets full on would engulf the car. At other times we car drivers would vent our impatience by hooting all the way along the line, which was noisy and merry. The final part of the queue ran for a couple of hundred metres in the open air, when we again had beautiful views of the snowy mountains.
When we reached the Argentine border checkpoint I had my first experience of being refused entry to a country. Our car documents, which had been ordered several months in advance, had taken us 2.5 labour hours of Alamo staff time to prepare upon collection at Santiago airport, and following that we'd had to make two further visits to a different Alamo office to ensure that we had the correct papers to take the car into Argentina. But we didn't have the correct papers. I spent quite a while in the border guard hut pretending to understand even less Spanish than I do but knowing, despite my denial to the guard as well as to myself, that he was insisting that we produce an international insurance certificate that we didn't have. It would have been the ideal place to make a call to the staff at Alamo who had issued us with our documentation but our cell phones didn't have any reception and the guard claimed not to have a phone that we could use. By the end of our little interview Paula had joined us and was in tears, at least partially, I believed, for effect, and I finally broke into Spanglish to declaim melodramatically that this spelt the end of our holiday.
Actually Paula and I both thought that our Argentine horse riding adventure might really be in danger and, for me, it was only the sheer size of our deposit that fortified my resolve to persist with the attempt at the border crossing. At this juncture I seriously considered trying a bribe, which an Argentine resident also later advised, and decided against it not out of shyness or for fear of imprisonment but because I only had 20 US$ in my wallet, which (since I had not one Argentine peso) I thought I would need almost immediately if we did make it across. I also considered just getting in the car and driving through anyway, which seemed to be feasible, banking on the laziness and incompetence of the cabinieri; correctly, though, I fortunately realised that this would not have been effective.
As we trudged back to the car the mountain scenery looked very Swiss and I felt like a character from The Sound of Music or a WW2 war movie about to run the last few hundred metres through knee-deep snow to the safety of a neutral land. But we returned through the tunnels and settled into the long queue to pass again through the Chilean border. Rather than hustling our way through the DMZ we used the time to make calls, now that we again had a signal, and got through to Alamo, whose immediate reaction was to swear that we had all of the correct papers. They promised to call the Argentine border and asked us to call back in an hour when they would have everything resolved. Instead of just sitting and looking out of the window, we inched forward (though, to be accurate, most of the time we were stationary) and Paula went and got advice from a guy in the Chilean office. His news was that the Argie guy was arguably correct but while we may be able to insist upon our right to travel into their country with no insurance, (a) he could just say No again and (b) well, we'd have no insurance. We called Alamo again and they agreed that both of these points were true.
Eventually we learned that if we crossed back into Chile we could get the papers we needed from a nearby hotel and try again. After considering all of the options that you can imagine passed through our minds we finally decided to do this and to stay in Mendosa for a night if and when we made it into Argentina. Luckily, we managed to get through to our hosts in Argentina and they kindly agreed to let us start our stay one day late. So that's what we did.
Of course, it took quite a while to get the papers and to return to the Chilean and then the Argentine crossing, but when we did we sailed through, brandishing our new certificate. We noticed that they hadn't checked our passports and correctly inferred as we drove along the open and empty road along the valley, that we would have another control point to clear. The wait at this one was less painful, though very far from being quick or efficient. There were actually two points within 10 metres of each other that we had to drive through - another Chilean post and another Argentine one - both of whom checked all of the same documents as the previous points as well as each giving us some new ones to complete. This reinforced a lesson that I've learned over the past couple of years or so at work: bureaucracy is inherently resistant to streamlining and if you want to improve it you should aim to remove it. In this spirit Paula said something that was also on my mind: "I'll never complain about the EU again". For all the stupid laws about bendy bananas, you can at least drive across the continent with a minimum of delay. (And I have no sympathy with the Daily Mail line that our border xenophobes are the best in Europe and that other states sloppily admit terrorists and drug traffickers - where are all the terrorists hanging out? They're in London!)
After these two checkpoints we had a couple more stops where guys with guns checked the same documents and did their own bit of rubber stamping and then, four hours after we'd first reached the border, we were in!
The place we had reached was a land of big scenery. For its vastness and drama we were all reminded of Africa, specifically of Namibia. Actually the terrain that we initially drove through reminded me of Marlboro country, with red mountains (still with snowy peaks), deep gorges and scrubby land with large cactuses. Also like Africa, there was mile after mile of open landscape showing no sign of human habitation, although the roads were much better. Tarmaced, with crisp dotted lines and regular bollards around each sweeping bend, the highway was like a life-size Scalextric track laid out in a diorama where the little bushes happened to be real. And that's how we drove.
As we drove we realised that we had made our first planning error of our trip. Over the next two days we came to appreciate that the journey from Santiago to our ranch would, even with the best possible border crossing, be a solid three or four day haul. Our intention to make it in a day defied absurdly defied the laws of physics. Our revised plan to do it in two days was challenging. We arrived at Mendosa ("just over the border") as the last of the light gave out but when we made it into town it was buzzing and pretty and we were in good spirits. For all of our year of travel we have booked accommodation in advance and this was a rare instance of what many people see as real travel: turning up somewhere with no fixed plans, open to whatever you find. We chose a hotel from the Top End range in Lonely Planet and Paula ran out to get us a room while I double parked on the main avenue outside. This scenario played out about a dozen more times - sometimes with me doing the inquiry to rule out the possibility of any lurking local misogyny - as we went from hotel to hotel like Joseph and Mary and saw that Mendosa was full. Paula and Zoe also tried the tourist centre, but this was a complete zoo and offered no hope of even finding anything close to town. So we had dinner in the city and, having no alternative, got back into the car and headed out along the highway in the direction of travel for the next day, hoping to find a place en route. (For completeness, I should report that I seriously entertained the idea of spending 20 minutes chatting to people in the square in the hope that someone would take us in. I didn't actually do it because I was too tired and had a splitting headache behind my eyes, but when I told Paula later she said the same thought had occurred to her. It reflects how friendly people are around here.)
We left the street cafe where we'd eaten shortly after 9:00 pm and it was by now pitch black. We tried a few places that were signed off the highway but they were all either full or too hard for us to find, and we developed the sense that we were wasting travel time by detouring off the main route. As we drove into the night I was getting more and more tired and starting to have difficulty construing the lights ahead: fatigue was exacerbated by occasional flashing beacons advertising roadside stops and decorative lights strewn across the tops of the cabins of some lorries. The time I'd spent figuring out why it takes e goes to reach a sum of random numbers exceeding one was beginning to tell. Things were made worse by a series of noxious fumes that invaded the car. If you've ever driven south through the Blackwell tunnel and been assaulted by the fumes from the factory on the south bank you'll have a sense of what it was like, although here there was a wide variety of malodorous gases that changed kaleidoscopically over several miles.
Writing about it now is like remembering a dream. At one point we turned off the highway to try out a town that featured quite prominently on the small Lonely Planet map of the region. Young people wandered around the road drinking and the place seemed both poor and unreal. As we felt then, there was no prospect of us staying in any establishment we were likely to find so we got back on the road to suck up the next 100 km to the town that had been signed all the way from Mendosa: La Paz. Apart from some youths hanging out by the gas station cafe La Paz was asleep, and, getting to the significant point, the two hotels were full. So we got back onto the highway yet again. Since Paula had had the stress of negotiating with all of officials while I'd been responsible for the car, I'd resisted asking her to do any driving. But now, with my legs aching and stiff and my head and eyes still sore, she had a go. On this day this was one trial too far for her so I took over again and soon, not feeling able to continue, we pulled over to an area of rough ground where several trucks had turned in for the night and tried to get some sleep in the car. This didn't work either. So we got back on the highway and I resolved myself for another 100 km or so to the town of San Luis for what would have to be our last chance at finding somewhere for the night.
Our Nissan Pathfinder, I ought to mention, is not quite BMW class on the motorway but it proved perfectly capable of ripping along at 160 km/h in comfort. And it lacks all of the annoyances of our previous hire cars (buzzers that go if you break 80, alarms that sound if you put the hand-brake on, or if you take it off, parts that don't work...). It's a capable vehicle on and off road and I'm glad that we had this car this month.
We finally arrived at in San Luis around 1 a.m. and found a town that, at that time, seemed ugly but, more importantly, alive and quite busy. This time we headed for what, according to Lonely Planet, is the only 4 star hotel in town and Paula refused their initial claims that they were full and stood at the desk pleading until they gave us two satisfactory rooms. (Now is not the time to quibble about the meaning of "4 star"). I fell asleep happily listening to the sound of loud music right by the window as a band for whom the last 50 years haven't happened played Bill Hailey and even Glenn Miller tunes until at least 2 a.m.
We slept!
The next day we arose just before they stopped serving breakfast and hit the road again at about 11 a.m. At the start of the day the length and ambition of our trip hadn't yet sunk in and we still hoped to arrive some time in the afternoon. As the day wore on, and especially as our real-life route peeled apart from the simple, optimistic plan of our directions, the spread on our hopeful arrival time widened to somewhere between 4:30 p.m. (Paula) and Please, God, before dinner (me). Having left the Andes the previous day, the scenery flattened out to huge wide open panoramas of agricultural land featuring vines, of course, but more notably very healthy looking cattle and horses. Police checkpoints are everywhere. These raise my hackles, seeming to me to be the vestiges of a totalitarian state, but Paula was more sympathetic: instead of hounding us for driving quickly the security forces here may usefully catch people without tax or insurance (it could have been us!). In any case, they always smiled nicely at us when they found out that we were English.
This is reassuring since Argentina is, I'm guessing, the only country that Britain has been to war with since 1945 with the backing of the majority of the nation. This is something that had escaped my mind until we arrived and found that every street name seems to include Belgrano or Malvenas. In case you've forgotten, The Belgrano was the Argentine war ship that Thatcher ordered to be sunk with huge loss of life as it retreated from contested waters. Seeing all these street signs reminded me of a boy I knew in my teens who signed up for the navy and was in the Falklands for the war - he described to me the still terror of being on a ship when each man on board was tracking fast-approaching Argentine bombers. For three of four minutes all they could do was prey that RAF fighters could take the bombers down before they destroyed the ship; they did.
Our journey was bad, but not that bad. The approach up to the ranch was made more tense because one of the roads we needed to drive along was closed and so we were unable to follow the final section of the instructions, which were all distance-based. We later learned that the instructions for arriving by road are not really user-tested either since no other guests have been foolhardy enough to try it. But we arrived, to the surprise of the owner, and at about 6:15, while it was still light.
Paula and Zoe have resolved that the 8th of October never happened. (This was also the day when we received an unexpected bill for over $100 for being seen at a hospital in Fairbanks, who prescribed costly antibiotics for Heidi's tooth when none of the dentists in town would give her treatment.)
We're here now, and the best thing I can say is that it's worth it, as I'll describe next time.
Our departure from Santiago went without difficulty, even though all of the roads on the outskirts of the city are being ripped up as part of a highway overhaul and so the road markings and signs are mostly missing or misleading. By mid-morning we were speeding through the Chilean countryside. The land here is more verdant than any we've seen since South Africa (where they irrigate the land so much that they risk depleting their sources of water) but the lush greens form the background to a unique preponderance of yellows, oranges and browns amongst the scrub bushes and wildflowers. It's all extremely pretty, in the Impressionist style. We turned off the main highway onto a straight single lane road, which was planted on both sides with vines. The most common mode of transport here was the horse and every rider wore a sombrero and a poncho; they seemed unfazed by the occasional cars, all of which we're travelling even more quickly than those on the motorway. As lunchtime approached we had turned towards the snow-capped Andes, which formed a beautiful and dramatic backdrop to the continuing expanses of rolling hills and vineyards and the cloudless blue sky; intense sun sparkled off ice wherever it rose to the surface of the snow.
The road signs continued to be surprisingly infrequent, and although we had no good maps there were many geographical clues to guide us, one of the most obvious of which was that we had to rise through the mountains. As we gained more height it began to seem reminiscent of a ski resort. And then, bizarrely, it was a ski resort, with pistes and skiers to the side of the road and ski lifts passing overhead. So far so good.
We reached the first border post and, after a short queue, passed through without incident. The queues really backed up in the long mountain tunnels, where the multi-axle lorries towered to within a foot or so of the roof on the nearside and seemed to have difficulty making the tighter bends. It would have been a bad place to be claustrophobic. At times when we were at a standstill a noise exactly like standing underneath an aeroplane with its jets full on would engulf the car. At other times we car drivers would vent our impatience by hooting all the way along the line, which was noisy and merry. The final part of the queue ran for a couple of hundred metres in the open air, when we again had beautiful views of the snowy mountains.
When we reached the Argentine border checkpoint I had my first experience of being refused entry to a country. Our car documents, which had been ordered several months in advance, had taken us 2.5 labour hours of Alamo staff time to prepare upon collection at Santiago airport, and following that we'd had to make two further visits to a different Alamo office to ensure that we had the correct papers to take the car into Argentina. But we didn't have the correct papers. I spent quite a while in the border guard hut pretending to understand even less Spanish than I do but knowing, despite my denial to the guard as well as to myself, that he was insisting that we produce an international insurance certificate that we didn't have. It would have been the ideal place to make a call to the staff at Alamo who had issued us with our documentation but our cell phones didn't have any reception and the guard claimed not to have a phone that we could use. By the end of our little interview Paula had joined us and was in tears, at least partially, I believed, for effect, and I finally broke into Spanglish to declaim melodramatically that this spelt the end of our holiday.
Actually Paula and I both thought that our Argentine horse riding adventure might really be in danger and, for me, it was only the sheer size of our deposit that fortified my resolve to persist with the attempt at the border crossing. At this juncture I seriously considered trying a bribe, which an Argentine resident also later advised, and decided against it not out of shyness or for fear of imprisonment but because I only had 20 US$ in my wallet, which (since I had not one Argentine peso) I thought I would need almost immediately if we did make it across. I also considered just getting in the car and driving through anyway, which seemed to be feasible, banking on the laziness and incompetence of the cabinieri; correctly, though, I fortunately realised that this would not have been effective.
As we trudged back to the car the mountain scenery looked very Swiss and I felt like a character from The Sound of Music or a WW2 war movie about to run the last few hundred metres through knee-deep snow to the safety of a neutral land. But we returned through the tunnels and settled into the long queue to pass again through the Chilean border. Rather than hustling our way through the DMZ we used the time to make calls, now that we again had a signal, and got through to Alamo, whose immediate reaction was to swear that we had all of the correct papers. They promised to call the Argentine border and asked us to call back in an hour when they would have everything resolved. Instead of just sitting and looking out of the window, we inched forward (though, to be accurate, most of the time we were stationary) and Paula went and got advice from a guy in the Chilean office. His news was that the Argie guy was arguably correct but while we may be able to insist upon our right to travel into their country with no insurance, (a) he could just say No again and (b) well, we'd have no insurance. We called Alamo again and they agreed that both of these points were true.
Eventually we learned that if we crossed back into Chile we could get the papers we needed from a nearby hotel and try again. After considering all of the options that you can imagine passed through our minds we finally decided to do this and to stay in Mendosa for a night if and when we made it into Argentina. Luckily, we managed to get through to our hosts in Argentina and they kindly agreed to let us start our stay one day late. So that's what we did.
Of course, it took quite a while to get the papers and to return to the Chilean and then the Argentine crossing, but when we did we sailed through, brandishing our new certificate. We noticed that they hadn't checked our passports and correctly inferred as we drove along the open and empty road along the valley, that we would have another control point to clear. The wait at this one was less painful, though very far from being quick or efficient. There were actually two points within 10 metres of each other that we had to drive through - another Chilean post and another Argentine one - both of whom checked all of the same documents as the previous points as well as each giving us some new ones to complete. This reinforced a lesson that I've learned over the past couple of years or so at work: bureaucracy is inherently resistant to streamlining and if you want to improve it you should aim to remove it. In this spirit Paula said something that was also on my mind: "I'll never complain about the EU again". For all the stupid laws about bendy bananas, you can at least drive across the continent with a minimum of delay. (And I have no sympathy with the Daily Mail line that our border xenophobes are the best in Europe and that other states sloppily admit terrorists and drug traffickers - where are all the terrorists hanging out? They're in London!)
After these two checkpoints we had a couple more stops where guys with guns checked the same documents and did their own bit of rubber stamping and then, four hours after we'd first reached the border, we were in!
The place we had reached was a land of big scenery. For its vastness and drama we were all reminded of Africa, specifically of Namibia. Actually the terrain that we initially drove through reminded me of Marlboro country, with red mountains (still with snowy peaks), deep gorges and scrubby land with large cactuses. Also like Africa, there was mile after mile of open landscape showing no sign of human habitation, although the roads were much better. Tarmaced, with crisp dotted lines and regular bollards around each sweeping bend, the highway was like a life-size Scalextric track laid out in a diorama where the little bushes happened to be real. And that's how we drove.
As we drove we realised that we had made our first planning error of our trip. Over the next two days we came to appreciate that the journey from Santiago to our ranch would, even with the best possible border crossing, be a solid three or four day haul. Our intention to make it in a day defied absurdly defied the laws of physics. Our revised plan to do it in two days was challenging. We arrived at Mendosa ("just over the border") as the last of the light gave out but when we made it into town it was buzzing and pretty and we were in good spirits. For all of our year of travel we have booked accommodation in advance and this was a rare instance of what many people see as real travel: turning up somewhere with no fixed plans, open to whatever you find. We chose a hotel from the Top End range in Lonely Planet and Paula ran out to get us a room while I double parked on the main avenue outside. This scenario played out about a dozen more times - sometimes with me doing the inquiry to rule out the possibility of any lurking local misogyny - as we went from hotel to hotel like Joseph and Mary and saw that Mendosa was full. Paula and Zoe also tried the tourist centre, but this was a complete zoo and offered no hope of even finding anything close to town. So we had dinner in the city and, having no alternative, got back into the car and headed out along the highway in the direction of travel for the next day, hoping to find a place en route. (For completeness, I should report that I seriously entertained the idea of spending 20 minutes chatting to people in the square in the hope that someone would take us in. I didn't actually do it because I was too tired and had a splitting headache behind my eyes, but when I told Paula later she said the same thought had occurred to her. It reflects how friendly people are around here.)
We left the street cafe where we'd eaten shortly after 9:00 pm and it was by now pitch black. We tried a few places that were signed off the highway but they were all either full or too hard for us to find, and we developed the sense that we were wasting travel time by detouring off the main route. As we drove into the night I was getting more and more tired and starting to have difficulty construing the lights ahead: fatigue was exacerbated by occasional flashing beacons advertising roadside stops and decorative lights strewn across the tops of the cabins of some lorries. The time I'd spent figuring out why it takes e goes to reach a sum of random numbers exceeding one was beginning to tell. Things were made worse by a series of noxious fumes that invaded the car. If you've ever driven south through the Blackwell tunnel and been assaulted by the fumes from the factory on the south bank you'll have a sense of what it was like, although here there was a wide variety of malodorous gases that changed kaleidoscopically over several miles.
Writing about it now is like remembering a dream. At one point we turned off the highway to try out a town that featured quite prominently on the small Lonely Planet map of the region. Young people wandered around the road drinking and the place seemed both poor and unreal. As we felt then, there was no prospect of us staying in any establishment we were likely to find so we got back on the road to suck up the next 100 km to the town that had been signed all the way from Mendosa: La Paz. Apart from some youths hanging out by the gas station cafe La Paz was asleep, and, getting to the significant point, the two hotels were full. So we got back onto the highway yet again. Since Paula had had the stress of negotiating with all of officials while I'd been responsible for the car, I'd resisted asking her to do any driving. But now, with my legs aching and stiff and my head and eyes still sore, she had a go. On this day this was one trial too far for her so I took over again and soon, not feeling able to continue, we pulled over to an area of rough ground where several trucks had turned in for the night and tried to get some sleep in the car. This didn't work either. So we got back on the highway and I resolved myself for another 100 km or so to the town of San Luis for what would have to be our last chance at finding somewhere for the night.
Our Nissan Pathfinder, I ought to mention, is not quite BMW class on the motorway but it proved perfectly capable of ripping along at 160 km/h in comfort. And it lacks all of the annoyances of our previous hire cars (buzzers that go if you break 80, alarms that sound if you put the hand-brake on, or if you take it off, parts that don't work...). It's a capable vehicle on and off road and I'm glad that we had this car this month.
We finally arrived at in San Luis around 1 a.m. and found a town that, at that time, seemed ugly but, more importantly, alive and quite busy. This time we headed for what, according to Lonely Planet, is the only 4 star hotel in town and Paula refused their initial claims that they were full and stood at the desk pleading until they gave us two satisfactory rooms. (Now is not the time to quibble about the meaning of "4 star"). I fell asleep happily listening to the sound of loud music right by the window as a band for whom the last 50 years haven't happened played Bill Hailey and even Glenn Miller tunes until at least 2 a.m.
We slept!
The next day we arose just before they stopped serving breakfast and hit the road again at about 11 a.m. At the start of the day the length and ambition of our trip hadn't yet sunk in and we still hoped to arrive some time in the afternoon. As the day wore on, and especially as our real-life route peeled apart from the simple, optimistic plan of our directions, the spread on our hopeful arrival time widened to somewhere between 4:30 p.m. (Paula) and Please, God, before dinner (me). Having left the Andes the previous day, the scenery flattened out to huge wide open panoramas of agricultural land featuring vines, of course, but more notably very healthy looking cattle and horses. Police checkpoints are everywhere. These raise my hackles, seeming to me to be the vestiges of a totalitarian state, but Paula was more sympathetic: instead of hounding us for driving quickly the security forces here may usefully catch people without tax or insurance (it could have been us!). In any case, they always smiled nicely at us when they found out that we were English.
This is reassuring since Argentina is, I'm guessing, the only country that Britain has been to war with since 1945 with the backing of the majority of the nation. This is something that had escaped my mind until we arrived and found that every street name seems to include Belgrano or Malvenas. In case you've forgotten, The Belgrano was the Argentine war ship that Thatcher ordered to be sunk with huge loss of life as it retreated from contested waters. Seeing all these street signs reminded me of a boy I knew in my teens who signed up for the navy and was in the Falklands for the war - he described to me the still terror of being on a ship when each man on board was tracking fast-approaching Argentine bombers. For three of four minutes all they could do was prey that RAF fighters could take the bombers down before they destroyed the ship; they did.
Our journey was bad, but not that bad. The approach up to the ranch was made more tense because one of the roads we needed to drive along was closed and so we were unable to follow the final section of the instructions, which were all distance-based. We later learned that the instructions for arriving by road are not really user-tested either since no other guests have been foolhardy enough to try it. But we arrived, to the surprise of the owner, and at about 6:15, while it was still light.
Paula and Zoe have resolved that the 8th of October never happened. (This was also the day when we received an unexpected bill for over $100 for being seen at a hospital in Fairbanks, who prescribed costly antibiotics for Heidi's tooth when none of the dentists in town would give her treatment.)
We're here now, and the best thing I can say is that it's worth it, as I'll describe next time.
Posted: Sun - October 9, 2005 at 07:10 AM
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Published On: Feb 08, 2006 06:20 PM
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Published On: Feb 08, 2006 06:20 PM