With our truncated stay in Buenos Aires due to our travel delays, we were unable to do any of our scheduled tours. We got to our hotel, caught up with our friends Doug and Kip, showered, ate and went to bed. The dinner at the hotel was a multi course New Year’s Eve special, complete with wine and champagne and cost an astounding 150000.00 pesos per person (about one hundred dollars each).

Portenos, as residents of Buenos Aires are called, have a low key approach to New Year’s Eve . They tend to eat dinner very late, and a celebratory dinner is usually it for the evening. We didn’t see or hear any fireworks or other signs of celebration, so we fit right in.

After a good night’s sleep we had breakfast at the hotel and then headed for Aeroparque Jorge Newberry for our flight to San Martin de los Andes. We tried to use the kiosk to get our boarding passes and seat assignments and were informed that the flight was overbooked and there were no available seats. That’s when the PTSD set in.

The line to the check in desks stretched through the airport, but moved fairly quickly. We got to the desk, got the last four seats on the plane and breathed a sigh of relief. Security, passport verification, boarding passes, x-Ray machine and all the little indignities we put up with to fly meant nothing. We had seats on the plane!

Our flight to San Martin was about two hours, and most of the flight was over flat farms and ranch land that looks very similar to the great plains of the United States: fields laid out in a grid pattern, with occasional irrigated crop circles, ponds and small lakes. Some bodies of water were green with algae, and others were white either along the shore or in their entirety, probably due to pollution.

When we thought we might not get seats on the plane we checked the possibility of driving to San Martin de Los Andes-18 hours by car! That’s when the size of Argentina became real; with primarily a north/south orientation, it’s over two thousand miles from Ushuaia in the far south to Buenos Aires. There is no reliable train system and the roads are not very good. Flying is the only way to go, and the do have a robust domestic flight network including Aerolineas Argentinas and a couple of budget airlines

We checked in to Hotel Viejo Esquiador(the hotel of the old skier) and walked to Lago Lacar, a beautiful glacial lake at the west end of town.

We had a nice dinner at Abasto restaurant next to the hotel and then went to bed. Argentinians keep late hours so we didn’t finish dinner until after 11:30.