City camping

We wanted to get up early today and get on the road, since we had 12+ hours of driving ahead of us, but it was raining out, the beds were comfortable and we really wanted to have the great breakfast at the hotel one last time, so it turned out that we didn’t get going until 11. As we headed out of Buenos Aires, we started noticing that there was a lot of standing water in the fields, and it appeared that the storm that we awoke to in the city had dropped most of its rain on the way to the coast. Soon the standing water turned into full on torrents of water going under the road, and then eventually over the road. We cautiously followed traffic into one flooded section where the river was going over the road, and then another. Soon we hit a roadblock, where the policeman said the road was totally washed out and impassable ahead, and we would need to take a detour east if we wanted to continue towards Mendoza. We didn’t have much of a choice, so we headed east away from our destination, circling around the flooded area. The detour cost us a few hours, and by midnight, we were still a couple of hours out of Mendoza.

We came to a town that had a sign for camping, so we figured we’d check it out, since getting a hotel that late was probably going to be tough. We found a little municipal campground in the middle of the town and it just happened to be attached to a restaurant (that was pretty busy for 1 in the morning!) We talked to the folks in the restaurant and sure enough they could let us into the campground, as well as still serve us dinner. After dinner we popped the top, and got to see what it was like sleeping four people in the van for the first time. Not Bad! We were all so exhausted that the large group near us singing and drinking didn’t even stop us from falling asleep immediately.