MUNGO EATS Latin America

Ah, another day, another adventure.  There is never a dull day on this voyage of ours.  Last night we were in Rada Tilly, a small town just outside Commodoro Rivadavia.  We didn’t really get to visit the town much, but what we did see showed us that it was a town with quite a bit of cash.  There is a lot of oil in this area of Argentina and I think this is where all the money is being spent.  The houses were all big, with large yards, and all the dogs were purebreds.  I saw samoyeds, weimeraners, labs, boxers, etc.  Yep, no “village dogs” here.

Our destination today was the Petrified Forest National Monument.   We visited a similar forest in the US and decided that we should visit one in the southern hemisphere and compare the two.  In the US, colorful crystals replaced the wood and the logs were swirls of many different colors.  Here, the wood looked more like wood, although there were some colorful bits.  We found that the logs here were larger, and the park is more relaxed about letting you touch the logs, so we could get some better pictures. 

There were several HUGE logs.  Some of the logs that we saw were 15 or 20 meters long, with trunk diameters of 1.5 to 2 meters.  Now I know that can be hard to imagine, so I have  some pictures to illustrate.  This is one of the longer  logs that we saw.

Sara is standing about in the middle and Kevin and Sean have almost walked to the end!!

Here are  some diameter pictures for you.

HUGE!!!  It is amazing how “wood looking” these rocks remain.

And you can see just how plentiful the logs are in this area.

Our other adventure today,  was unplanned and a lot less expected.  We were driving down the road and Sean suddenly noticed a bit of smoke coming from one of the cupboards.  We stopped to investigate and found a small electrical fire had started where one of the “extra” batteries is stored.  We have 3 batteries in the the van, one to start the van, one to power the lights and water pump and a third one to keep the fridge running.  The fridge battery is housed in one of the cupboards along with some other assorted van parts that Kevin has along just in case.  I will not try to explain what happened EXACTLY, but an assorted auto bit caused a short in some electrical thingy and this caused other assorted auto bits to get hot and start smoking.  That is what we were smelling.  All is well though, the smoldering auto bits are no longer usable, but really, we didn’t even have to get out the fire extinguisher.   So Mom…DON’T WORRY!!  From now on, nothing else goes in the battery cupboard!

Let’s hope for a nice boring day tomorrow!