By Marco Richter de Medeiros
So my parents decided to take us on a road trip around Argentina. I was not the happiest child in the world. If you may not know already, I hate road trips. Being cramped into a car fit for only 5 people is not very fun, especially when each day of driving takes over 3 hours. The car was not the biggest, but we planned to change the packing situation so that we each had more space. The car had a fold up backseat that I sat in.
Some of the places that we went to were, La Cumbre, Mendoza, Neuquen, and Peninsula Valdez.
La Cumbre is not very big. Roughly the size of Redmond. The population is around 10,090 people. We tried to go to a Jesuit mission, but they weren't open. Then we tried to find another and couldn't find it. So we really only went out to get a nasty roadside spaghetti lunch. Anyway, La Cumbre was not my favorite, even though before we left I got an Alfajore. Alfajores are little cookie type things that make me sit up and beg. In other words, the best thing ever! The one that I got had a pretty common carmel type thing called dulce de leite, and then was sandwiched in shortbread cookies.
Mendoza is a city about the size of Natal in Brazil. Not super big but not extremely small - 935,000 people. We stayed in Hotel Bohemia, a small hotel in downtown Mendoza. It may have been small, but it was quite comfortable. The rooms were tiny, but large enough for a human being to live sanely. They had good showers but not spacious beds. I got stuck with the single bed that must have been made for a baby. They served breakfast as well. I would give it 4 1/2 stars.
Neuquen was the dinosaur town. The population is 264,600 people. I loved it so much because when I was little, dinosaurs were my life. Heather was excited as well, for she too loves dinosaurs. We stayed in a bed & breakfast, but that’s not important. What's important is the dinosaur tour. The first one we went to had a cool model of a newly discovered carnivore, I have to admit that I always imagined them to be 5 times bigger than they actually are. Its name was Gigantosaurus, and it was awesome! We saw a vertebrae that was both taller than me and bigger than me. The second museum we went to had the Argentinosaurus, the biggest herbivore dinosaur in the world. The skeleton took up almost the entire warehouse that it was in. The leg was already the size of a fat wolf, also taller than the biggest elephant that you could find. If you don’t believe me, then go on the internet, it has all the answers. We also saw some dinosaur prints in a lake, which was kind of cool but I was more in it for the skeletons. If you like dinosaurs, you will love Neuquen, it was a dinosaur paradise.
Peninsula Valdez was the last stop on our road trip, where we saw whales, penguins, and sea lions. The population of humans is 430, and population of whales is 400-1700. When we got there I was so excited because it was so small, and it reminded me of home. You could walk everywhere. We stayed in a little motel, and when I say little I actually mean tiny. There were only four rooms, each identified by color, so red, green, orange. We stayed in yellow. All the rooms are the same size and same floor plan. Our first day out was to see the whales, Southern Right Whales to be exact. They were pretty cool, but I was kind of scared when we went close to the mother and baby, because of the fact that we could have posed as a threat, then been tipped over and gotten killed. Otherwise they were cool =D.
Next we went to go see the sea lions in kayaks (we were in the kayaks, not them). It was kind of scary, because Bella kept making it that way. My dad got a fabulous video of a sea lion under the kayak with the GoPro. They sounded like they were burping like crazy, due to the sound of the noise they do. Last were the penguins, and I gotta say, they were adorable! I got 12 selfies with them. I can't even tell you how many times I almost passed out because of their cuteness. They burrowed in little holes in the ground, and I'm not kidding, they were less than 4 feet away from me. Some were that close, but then others were farther away next to the beach. I think that Peninsula Valdez was my favorite place on our road trip, but that doesn’t mean that I liked the road trip itself.