Day 21 to 27 - Uh oh.......our last week

Read from the bottom up!

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So, it seems like we had some travel problems coming and going. Trying to get boarding passes online today, we saw that our return flights were listed as being cancelled. A little frantic, to say the least, we called the airline and they had, in fact, mistakenly cancelled our flights. They did rebook the flights for us and we´re hoping that, for all of our anxiety, they´ll upgrade us to first class. You´ll have to wait until we get back to find out, since this will be our last blog entry from out of country.

We´ll have lots more pictures to bore you with when we get home. For anyone really interested, we´ll have DVD´s available for sale.

We arrived back in Buenos Aires for our final days and spent time walking around Palermo. In addition to great grafitti and fabulous store fronts like this Apple store, this is a great area to walk around, with terrific restaurants and funky, chic stores - much like New York´s Soho. In fact, part of Palermo is called Palermo Soho.

On our second day in Bariloche, we headed to Llao Llao (pronounced Zhao Zhao here) to the spectacular resort here, with a magnificent golf course that Hank DID NOT play. But he was happy with the fabulous lunch we had overlooking the property´s grounds. Actually, without eating there, we wouldn´t have been allowed to enter the hotel.




And, of course there´s the chocolate. Chocolate stores like this one everywhere. We had chocolate with breakfast, lunch and dinner....and sampled more as we walked the main street.



You get the idea here. We walked down to the waterfront just in time for an exhibition of parasailing surfers (we had never seen this before!) crossing the lake in winds that churned up whitecaps. They, along with sailboarders, were exciting to watch.



The center plaza in Bariloche reflects its Swiss heritage, having been settled in the early 20th century by Swiss immigrants. The city´s setting is picture-postcard beautiful, surrounded by snow-capped mountains reflected in the region´s lakes.




As opposed to what we had left behind.



Finally, the sun broke as we neared our final destination and this is what we headed towards in Bariloche.

So, the two days preceding our lake crossing to Bariloche were picture perfect - sun shining, mountain peaks reflected in the turquoise lakes. We were set for the spectacular trip described in all of the travel literature.

You might think from Arlene´s smile here (laughing at the irony of it?) that that was the case, but as you can see here, the day of the crossing turned out to be dreary and overcast and, as the guide described what we were supposed to be seeing to our left and right, we unfortunately only saw cloud-covered land masses and gray waterways.