1/24-A Little Ride to a Punta, And a Little Flight Booking

Since I’m by myself here in Rio Grande, with nothing to do, I decided to go for a short ride. I had a look on the map, and saw a Reserve called Punta Popper. The name made me chuckle, so I set that as my destination. I found the Reserve on my Garmin, and let it route me there. 

In my limited experience around Rio Grande, it looks and feels a lot like Rio Gallegos. However, one thing R. Grande seems to have is bike paths. We saw one when we drove in yesterday, and I rode on this one today. 

It’s nice because the road (although it doesn’t look like it in this photo) had a fair amount of traffic. 

I had to cross the Rio Grande. The path continued up onto the bridge. 

These cement sections moved a bit. 

Rio Grande. 

I made my way out to Punta Popper. The road didn’t actually go all the way out to the point itself. Beyond the end of the road, it was a hiking trail. It didn’t look like bikes were allowed. I just went over to the beach on the Atlantic side. 

Looking to the end of the point. 

Looking on down the beach. 

I had my Garmin route me back to the start. Interesting thing I’ve noticed about the streets. First, there are many one-way streets. When you cross them, if the cars are coming from the left, they often have a speed bump. This slows them down because the crossing traffic has the right of way (there are very few stop signs, and people don’t stop at them anyway). One-way traffic coming from the right has no speed bump. 

In total, my ride was only 8 or so miles. Of course, since it was an out and back, half the ride was a tailwind, and half was a headwind. It was good to spin the legs a bit. 

Awhile after I got back, I got a message from Alex that they were booking their flight from Ushuaia. They ended up with a flight to Buenos Aires (they will visit Ally and Alex) on Feb 8th. I had been looking at that date as well, but when I looked again, it had gone up in price almost double! There was still a much cheaper flight on the 15th, so I booked that. It is cheaper for me to stay longer in Ushuaia than to pay for an earlier flight. My flight ended up being almost a third of what it would have been had I booked for the week before! So, I’ll be in Ushuaia one week longer than Alex and Markus. We’ll see what I find to keep me occupied…

The end is in sight. Funny thing, I will depart Ushuaia exactly three months from when I arrived in Puerto Montt.