We leave Bahia Bustamante in the predawn light. It is heartbreaking to leave a place where we were so extraordinarily welcomed and entertained by strangers, but it is good to get on the road again. After getting hopelessly lost on the one road out of Bustamante we finally arrive at route 3. Though our intention is really to cut across the desert to the Patagonian Andes, my eyes have now gotten seriously bad again, so we drive to the nearest town that might have a doctor. The town, a once gritty place that is now swimming in money, owes it's prosperity to oil. We spend 24 hours there, on a variety of mundane wild goose chases, looking first for a doctor, then camping supplies, a tire pressure gauge (try translating that), eye glasses, and finally the day has more or less worn away. We stay in a nice enough hotel and eat a good meal at a cheerful bar. We actually stay in quite good spirits, despite the fact that we are not in the most sought after of Patagonia's wildernesses. The comedic highlight of our stroll around town that evening is when Casey ducks into a store to buy a new mate gourd (his is cracked!). Me and dad wait outside as the store is fairly uninteresting. Suddenly we hear a vast crash and a shower of breaking glass. Casey, I say forlornly, and sure enough we look inside and there he is standing over a shattered tray of no less than 12 large glass beer mugs. He looks bashful and the owner is not pleased. Dad and I are cracking up. Although Casey invents some story about his jacket getting caught on the shelf, it is pretty clear that he just wanted to be the center of attention after a long day worrying about percy's eye.  On the way back to the hotel Casey predicts that the only person on TV will be Bruce Willis and, sure enough, we end up watching Lucky Number Slevin. Ultimately, we snatch victory from the jaws of defeat in our visit to Comodoro Rivadavia, and next morning are back on the open road with my eyes much improved. 

We drive all day, in the same relentless style that had served us well on many a trip. Speeding through the vast desert with huge open skies above us, good music and good conversation. We make one stop, our last junction for now with the ocean, at a little dusty port town called Puerto San Julian (whose tourism slogan is "redefining desolate"). There were very cool crumbling wooden boats washed up on shore and forming art/climbing structures. We climb around on the decaying but impressive old fishing boats and i go for a swim in a bay of questionable cleanliness, never one to miss and opportunity to swim, especially in the ocean. Eventually we turn off the main paved highway onto a road that crosses Patagonia to the Andes. Night begins to fall as we grind slowly along an extremely bumpy dirt road so we pull forlornly to the side and set up camp for the night. We are forlorn simply because of the brutal wind that has been threatening to overturn our little rental car and now threatens to make for a ruinous evening of camping. But we manage to find the one withered shrub of a tree in all of Patagonia and amazingly the wind drops as evening falls. Like a well oiled machine, we spring into action. Not one boy scout among us, and yet you have never seen such a rapid and flawlessly efficient setup as ours, alone for a thousand miles in any direction. Tent up, firewood collected, sleeping bags laid out, fire blazing merrily, water boiling. We are, in truth, I'll prepared for camping, and we fashion wine glasses out of sawed in half water bottles and make cutlery out of splintered bits of wood and caseys deconstructed electric haircutting kit. And then, with wine (San Felicien, our universally agreed favorite malbec) flowing, steak sizzling, and pasta boiling, Casey and I whip out instruments, tune roughly in the still desert air, and improvise a desert jam in the crackling firelight the likes of which has not been heard before or since. Not that our musicianship was especially refined at that moment, bur rather that circumstance, the vast expanse of desert, the makeshift camp, the companionship of long travel and the excitement of stories told and others yet untold, the warmth of fire and wine, feed the music a life that is sought after in many a concert hall as recording studio. Passion and adventure, key ingredients of life, were present in that moment, and they fueled the song that sprung from 7 strings of steel and three of nylon. But passion and adventure had been there before. The new addition, secret ingredient, was the spontaneity, the impossibility of us being there at that moment, under a sky of glittering stars both reminiscent of home and yet, in their southern hemisphere incarnations, utterly different and foreign. You could not make this up, this moment. You could not write this song, tell this story, if it weren't true.