Day 8: To Angostura AR

today was one of the long days. We rode on dirt road for 125 km. It went beside a lake, and was up kind of on the side of hills and mountains. It was the most wash boarded and muddy road yet.

One of the guys license plate cracked off from the vibration and the lower part with the numbers fell off. All that's left is the upper part that says Chile. So far it has not been a problem at border crossing. Our fingers are crossed.

Here are some pictures from the 125 km dirt road ride. It rained lightly the entire ride.

My boots and riding gear are no longer pristine and new looking any more.

The dirt road ended and we hit pavement right before the border crossing into Argentina. There was a TV tuned to a channel playing 1980's era music videos. It took so long to get through the border crossing we were playing a game to see who could name the band and the song first. Good fun.

Once in Argentina the landscape flattened out and we rode mostly paved roads till the turnoff on a dirt road to tonight's hotel. Huge grand vistas. The horizon was so far away. We are now in the Patagonia desert.

We saw a couple of Alpacas beside the road and pulled over to try and get pictures. Little did we know there would be Alpacas beside the road for the next 50 km. There were so many of them the concern we had was to not hit one. They were everywhere. Hitting one would have ruined my day. Luckily no one hit any Alpacas.

we drove so far today we had multiple gas stops. This one was fun. A gas station in the middle of nowhere, and nothing else, no town or anything. The three gas pumps were completely covered with stickers.

After about 300km of pavement we turned off on a gravel road and rode about another 15km till we got to tonight's hotel, which is a sheep ranch that has been in the same family for many generations. There are really old family pictures in the dining room, where we are eating.

tomorrow is more dirt roads, ad some of it is sand. So probably another challenging day, but kilometers will be less than an average day. So a trade off.