12/16 & 17: Home via Feasting in Buenos Aires!

After spending a surprisingly fun, fun week in Paraguay, we flew back to Buenos Aires, Argentina, and one step closer to home. We'd first explored the city known for tango, Evita Peron and so much more on our initial trip to South America back in 2017 and were really happy to make it our first and last stop on this six-week jaunt to Antarctica, Patagonia and Paraguay. I admit the primary reason we wanted to fly in and out of Buenos Aires was to see if our memories of a mouth-watering dinner we'd had at Parrilla Pena were really as good as we thought!

Just behind Steven's bald pate, a waiter used what we could only call a 'wine grabber' to get a bottle of wine down from the shelf above our table. He must have had lots of experience because the bottle never wavered as it moved inches above our heads!

If you love a big slab of fork-tender meat, simple mashed potatoes, washed down with a delicious Malbec, all at rock-bottom prices by North American standards, look no further than this restaurant if you're in the Southern Hemisphere! 

The tables were very close to each other which we didn't mind as we were able to chat with a French couple celebrating a birthday. This was their first time dining there so they didn't know that the servings were so humongous, they needn't have ordered an entree and vegetables for each of them!

Since our flight out wasn't until late that night, a good chunk of our last day was a delightfully lazy one spent hanging out in the Plaza Lavalle. The pretty square was just a two-minute walk from our hotel and we'd walked through it oodles and oodles of times in our previous visits to Buenos Aires in 2017 and before we flew south to Antarctica. Since it was a gloriously sunny day, we took advantage of relaxing in the sun for as long as we could, knowing we would be back in snowy Denver in a matter of hours!

After hours reading and people watching, we finally went for a walk to enjoy the city one last time.

We had one last supper, or very late lunch, really back at 'our' restaurant where even one of the waiters recognized us from our frequent visits!

I was drawn in by the classical lines in much of the city's architecture. 

A final view of Teatro Colon, the opera house located just across from Plaza Lavalle, that we'd had the pleasure of touring on another visit.

The guitarists playing tango music entertained not only the cafe's customers but passersby like us, too!

As Buenos Aires was a tremendously exciting and vibrant city, and it had our favorite restaurant anywhere in the world, it was sad to bid 'Adios' to it and the fabulous time we'd had exploring more of the continent.

Next post: I never had a chance to finish writing the posts on our six-week trip to Ireland and the UK that we took shortly before leaving for South America. I left off with our trip to Belfast way back on September 21st, so the next post will be to the Boyne Valley.

Posted on February 27th, 2020, from a sunny but windy day in Denver, a few days before leaving for our extended trip to Asia and the Middle East.  I hope you will bear with me as I try and finish blogging about our all too brief time in Wales, visiting some of the Scottish Isles and a few days in London interspersed with our adventures in Asia!

12/15: Sad & Stormy Farewell to Paraguay!

After spending a week with our fantastic driver and guide, Jose, who took us all over southern Paraguay to see the missions set up in the early years of the 17th century by the Jesuits and Franciscans, we reluctantly headed north again from Trinidad toward the capital of Asuncion.

The entrance sign - or, in our case, the exit sign - welcoming people to Trinidad had a modern image of the Trinity which referred to the town's religious heritage.

Jose pointed out the large number of fields of soybeans, sunflowers and corn.

Jose pointed out the farming community of Fram that had so many Japanese farmers the local police station was called Fuji after the famous mountain Mt. Fujiyama we'll be seeing in a few months' time as part of our trip to Asia.

We kept passing lots of billboards promoting the use of certain seeds and fertilizers - something we'd never come across before.

We might as well have been back in the US Midwest seeing silos after silos around Fram - Steven thought there were even more than back home and that said a lot!

Since arriving in Paraguay about ten days ago, we'd noticed well over 100 roadside memorials but none as elaborate as this one located near the town of Yuyraity.

No wonder so much of Paraguay was such a perfect area for growing so many crops and even five crops every two years with such easy access to water as the river near Carmen del Parana. Limited water access for farmers here in Colorado and the other Western states makes their lives so difficult.

Jose proudly remarked that the best Brangus bull in the world had  just been award to one from Paraguay. In case you're wondering, a Brangus was a cross breed of Angus and Brahma!

One of the oddest sights I'd ever seen on a farm was this line of horses all in a straight line! Click on the picture so you can see them more clearly.

If you thought Paraguay was a desperately poor country, scenes like these shining silos might make you think again.

I couldn't help but wonder if someone died here paying too much attention to the fertilizer signs!

Near the town of Coronel Bogado these eucalyptus trees had the whitest of trunks.

You HAVE to click on this sign welcoming visitors to San Patricio Missiones so you can make it bigger to see the shamrock on the left! Steven and I got a hoot out of the sign and the town as we met on St. Patrick's Day way back in 1981 in tiny Zihuatanejo, Mexico!

Several days earlier, we'd spent way too short a time in glorious Santa Maria de Fe, exploring its topnotch diocesan museum and church with a delightful and young local guide, Lelis, who spoke almost perfect English. The town was known as being the only one in the entire country for its embroidery crafts made by the local women. As the shop, Taller de Hermandad, was closed when we'd spent the night next door at the lovely inn, Jose had promised us we'd return there on our way back to Asuncion. He'd made arrangements for the shop to be opened only for us even though it was a Sunday morning.

I felt more than a little overwhelmed by the huge number of choices and colors of items to buy. They ranged from bookmarks, small purses, note cards to wall hangings. I bought some of each as they were truly unique and we wanted to support the local artisans who had so kindly opened up just for us. Thank goodness Lelis was there to act as our translator while Jose waited in the car.

Ever since leaving Trinidad that morning, Jose had been very wary of the huge storm that had been forecast for midday. We'd hoped to make another stop, this one back in the pottery town of Aregua to check out another shop that had been closed before, but the severity of the storm precluded that.

The storm brought such huge winds Jose had a tough time controlling the car when wind gusts blew in between two fronts. 

As Steven and we weren't driving, we could admire the beauty of the countryside as the storm came in, but I sure didn't tell Jose that as I know it was pretty hairy for him! I felt a little bit like one of the storm chasers you see on TV rushing into the eye of the storm!

When the rain started with a vengeance at 11:30, the roads in some of the towns became a godawful mess because there weren't sufficient drains, thereby causing lots of flooding in low lying areas. One time it got so bad, Jose took an unknown detour but we came mighty close to being stuck in the mud!

We said sad goodbyes to Jose when he dropped us off at our small inn near the airport in Asuncion around 4:30. We'd so lucked out finding a reference to him on the Trip Advisor Paraguay forum so long ago. He had been an invaluable guide to the wonders of his country and had literally opened up so many doors when so many museums and churches were otherwise closed. Thanks to Jose, we had a marvelous sense of his country's rich religious history, its music, its important farming and cattle industry, and its delightful people who had opened their hearts to us.

Our hotel was literally a two minute drive away from the airport but it was located in a mostly upscale suburban area and we didn't hear one flight take off or land from the moment we arrived until we left the next morning at dawn for our flight south to Buenos Aires, Argentina, and one step closer to home. 

The host, who looked so much like a paler President Obama, kindly got up early and drove us to the airport in his swanky Mercedes for just  a few bucks. He even wanted to carry our bags inside thinking we'd have to pay a porter to take them to the airline desk but we managed to tell him in our pidgin Spanish it wasn't necessary!  

His wife, Maria, had insisted on exchanging phone numbers via Whats App and, using its translator app, texted me a couple of times offering any help we needed to make our stay as pleasant as possible. If we were ever to return to Asuncion, we knew we'd be welcomed there again!

Next post: Back to Buenos Aires and our favorite restaurant!

Posted on February 25th, 2020, from Denver as we're madly scrambling trying to tie up last minute details for our very long trip this weekend to Asia and the Middle East.