It's snowing and more trials

This is the latest from Guillermo, sent at 3pm on Monday:
We just got done eating a good lunch: we both had meat that was very rare, and salad and French fries that we shared, and a beer each. It was good and I put it on the credit card because I had not tried the ATMs here yet and I am still a little gun shy. We then went to two different banks and the ATMs were out of order. At the third bank, I got the same message as before, so I asked for a smaller amount and it seemed to go through, but then it said sorry, there is a temporary problem. So I then went to the other ATM machine in the same place and I had to go through the same process as in Puerto Pirámides. With the high prices here, it will probably go pretty fast; however, I am confident that I will be able to get more when I need it, but we should be fine for a pretty good while.

This morning we flew to El Calafate on an Argentine military plane that takes passengers and is a little cheaper than other airlines because it doesn't fly back to Buenos Aires as the others do to get to these places. El Calafate is way down at the very bottom of Argentina, but before Tierra del Fuego, along the Andes and close to Chile. It is 5 degrees celsius and raining and they say it has been raining for the last two days, but that it usually doesn't even rain here, so we are hopeful that tomorrow it will be better and our plan is to go to the Perito Moreno Glacier. We will go to a place from where we can observe it and then get on a boat that will take us closer to the ice cliff. There is another very interesting excursion that goes by 5 different glaciers and apparently the boat circles some of the ice bergs in the channel. Some of the glaciers are larger than the perito moreno and with higher cliffs, but that one would cost more, so I think we will skip it. The snow is very low in the mountains, but no snow here in the town.

Yes that armadillo that looked like it was wearing a skirt was really funny and I could just picture him and the Energúmeno getting into a really funny tussle. Tell Nena my money would have been on the armadillo!!

This website has information and pictures of Perito Moreno Glacier but you can put that in Google and find plenty of other good sites, too. Perito Moreno Glacier

Back at home:
What I did today was go to our credit union (again)to see if they knew anything about why Guillermo can't take out the full amount of money he wants, if they knew why he has to do it in bits and pieces. Apparently, it has something to do with being in Argentina because checking the Thorntree site, there are plenty of other people who have gone or are going through the exact same thing. We also got a call from the "fraud department" today, and they need Guillermo to call them. So, I let him know through email and he called me asking what that was all about. After he talked with them, it came to light that at least one, possibly two ATM transactions that were denied him, in fact did go through to our credit union. (That was probably that transaction he talked about above where the machine said there was a temporary problem.) So, now it's back to the credit union tomorrow for me to try to get that straightened out. This has been a real hassle, but at least they have been able to get money and it did help to read that they aren't the only ones having ATM and money difficulties over there.

When Guillermo called me after calling the fraud department, he told me that it was snowing there in El Calafate. It wasn't actually sticking to the ground, but it was snowing. Oh, and in that sentence where Guillermo uses the word "Energumeno", that is actually what he calls Rebeca's dog Blackjack, a.k.a. Diablillo. That dog has many names and every single one of them fits!!! That's little Diablillo below!

Between credit union and bank visits, I did manage to get in a walk in "our" park today, which is always very pleasant. :-)