Lucky us, the pavement continued for the first climb, about 8km out of town.
It was a good opportunity to get used to having the flat pedal on the right side. By the way, Billy is a little embarrassed about his pedals not matching. I’m sure he’ll get used to it. I’m not so sure if I will! I am glad that I kept the left clipless pedal on, though. My bike shoes don’t grip the flat pedal all that great, so at least one foot is secure.
At the top of the first climb, the road went back to gravel.
Ahhh pavement, you were nice while you lasted.
Unfortunately, the gravel was really washboarded. Pretty much the entire day was a lot of washboard. If you had any loose fillings, you would have rattled them out. Even with the suspension, it was a full day of rattling the bones! And yet, we did 62kms (we only planned about 55, but more about that later).
We rode along, and by several lakes today.
I can’t remember what this one was called. You can see the road along the lake.
We also had numerous climbs. As for the wind, well, as Alex said, “The wind is broken.” Yes, it was mostly a headwind. At least on the climbs, the hills blocked a bit of the wind. I some respects, having the wind was good. Without it, it would have been really hot, and the biting flies would have been even more annoying. Honestly, the wind didn’t bother me nearly as much as the washboard.
A few kms short of 30, we came across this camping/comida place. It was in the middle of nowhere.
Inside, it was quite homey.
Alex and Markus had giant cups of coffee. I had Fanta. The woman said we could eat our lunch there too. She didn’t have much food for sale, because they hadn’t been restocked yet after Christmas. It was nice to get out of the wind.
We were more than halfway, and about halfway done with the climbing.
San Sebastian, the patron saint of fishermen.
We finally reached the highest point for the day.
Going down now!
Nice view of the mountains.
The downhill was spectacular!
Going all the way down!
Still going down!
We crossed a river.
We had the option to go 3kms off the Carratera to a campground, but we decided to continue on to a wild camp spot that was on iOverlander. It was not too much further. Well, we got to it, and we’re not impressed. There were to dog biting flies, and the access to the river wasn’t good. We decided to go on, and see if we could find a better place. We looked at a spot across the river, but there was a gate. There was another iOverlander spot about 4 or 5kms away. We decided to head for that, keeping our eyes open for a good spot. We stopped at one spot where the campsite wasn’t good, but there was good water. We filled up the dromedary bags, and carried them on the bikes for the last 3kms to the iOverlander wild camp spot. Nothing like adding 6kg at the end of the day. And, there was another climb. It wasn’t too bad though. We found the spot. It’s kind of funky, with old machinery and old tires laying around, but it’ll do. We have easy access to the river (so we didn’t need to carry water), and we are off the road.
The wind was still blowing, and there are the flies, but we managed. As I am writing this in my tent, the wind has died down considerably. It’s 10:00pm, and still light out. Since we did an extra 7kms today, we’ll have a shorter day (it was already going to be shorter) tomorrow. Here’s one final shot for today.
Goodnight from Patagonia.
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