Farewell South America

(And another unpublished post, from March 22).

We leave in four days.  I never did finish my thoughts on Patagonia, but I can say with certainty that I miss it. Uruguay is lovely, but after four weeks here I can definitely say I am not a beach person. What do people do on the beach all day? A person can only lay in the sand for so many days.  The kids, of course, have loved it.  Lots of swimming in the pool, and in the ocean. But the weather is turning cooler, and they’re finding it too cold to really go in.  I have become more intimately acquainted with changes in the ocean. How some days the waves are so wild, and other days the ocean is completely calm.  Changes in the wind, changes in the height of the waves.  Some days you can walk along the beach, other days it is completely swallowed up.

I am excited to return to Minnesota. Though I am desperately trying not to wish away these final days of vacation.  I am guilty of always wanting to return when I near the end of a vacation instead of enjoying the last bits.  With such a long vacation, that means the end of my vacation is still a week of time. I am trying not to waste it by wishing it away.

The wind here is relentless. Although it is beautiful outside much of the time, the wind can be so intense it makes my eyes water. It makes me want to go inside, which is not really what I want to be doing. I want to be enjoying the end of our nice weather before we return to Minnesota.

Uruguay has been hard for our family, though.  There have been no other kids around.  There has been barely anybody around at all, because it is no longer high season here and everyone has left. It is like being on Cape Cod in September. It’s a little depressing.

My dad and step mom visited for 10 days which was a lovely reprieve. We got to hang out, they watched  the kids a bit so we could have some time by ourselves (a first on this entire trip!).  We ventured to a town called Cabo Polonia, which is completely off the grid.  The only energy source was solar, and supposedly at night they just use candles. To get there we had to take a giant, two story dune buggy a few miles (five, maybe?). We only stayed for the day, but it was an interesting little place.  I think it's where you go if you're hiding from the law, or perhaps if the rest of the world moves too fast for you.

One thing I will not miss about Uruguay: spiders.  Epic numbers of spiders, epic sizes.  One night we mistakenly left a window open (there were no screens and it was hot!) and the house was infested by mosquitos.  The mosquitos were so small, they looked harmless, and you couldn't feel them bite.  But the itch that developed was intense.  Greta's room became infested with mosquitos, and the poor girl got completely covered in bites.  The next day, after we learned our lesson, hubs and I tried to kill all the mosquitos in her room.  I pulled back a curtain and the largest spider I've ever seen in my life crawled out.  Like, maybe the size of both of my hands.  It's probably grown larger in my mind, but I'm not sure.  It was really freaking big.  We had no idea if it was poisonous.  Thankfully, the husband was willing to deal with it.  We covered it with a bowl and put a pizza pan underneath to trap it, then took it outside.  We flooded the bowl with water to drown it.  It was far too large to imagine the crunch that would occur if we squished it.

Based on internet pictures we couldn't quite figure out what kind it was, so we asked an online spider geek, who identified it as a Huntsman spider (also called a giant crab spider because it looks like a crab.)  They don't have webs but just wander around "hunting" at night.  Very reassuring.  Not fatal, but basically flu-like symptoms if you get bit.  Also, in our research, we learned far more about Uruguayan spiders, only adding to our terror.  Among the common spider sitings: the most poisonous spider in the world, the Brazilian Banana Spider.

Although that was our largest spider encounter, it was by far not our only.  One night I woke up about 2 am and went to get water in the kitchen.  The floor of the kitchen was covered in hundreds of very small ants.  We lovingly called these ants "housekeeper ants".  They would come out about the time we were getting ready for bed, then carry away all the minuscule crumbs on the floor.  At first we tried to aggressively sweep to avoid them, but they appeared anyway and found crumbs we didn't know exist.  But they never got into anything else, so we came to appreciate them for helping us tidy. Anyway, on this night there were hundreds of them, more than I had seen any other day, and in one corner was a fairly large huntsman spider, waiting to pounce on them.  It seemed like too large a problem for 2 am, so I went back to bed.  The next morning, there were no signs of any of these insects.  Retreated into the walls, no doubt.

But on the subject of ants, we discovered that there are leaf-cutter ants in Uruguay.  I remember these guys from Costa Rica, years ago, and have always found them fascinating.  They carry bits of leaves, often 5 times their size, down paths to the hole in the ground they live in.  The paths are so well worn you an see them from a distance.  They will carry these bits of leaves long distances, often passing up nearby leaves that look just the same to me.  The kids and I watched some fascinating youtube videos about them, and the kids became a bit obsessed with them (as did I).

There is a small kitten we have been feeding while we've been here.  At first I was conflicted about feeding it, knowing we would be leaving and it would be abandoned.  But it already appeared to be abandoned, with no parent around, so at least, perhaps, we could try to fatten it up a bit until it can more easily fend for itself.  That was my thinking, anyway.  The kids named it Gentleman, after the kitten on the farm they also fell in love with, which it looked so much like.

There is so much more to say, but I will leave it here.  Perhaps I will have more to say in Minnesota.