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Since our last blog post we have made some quick progress towards the capital city of Buenos Aires. After Tafi del Valle, and waking up in a bit of a haze after a few bottles of wine and chatting the night away with our Norwegian amigos, we took off towards the city of Cordoba. We got a bit of a late start and had about 600km to cover, I think our longest day of the trip, and ended up arriving into town a bit after dark. We found a campground in a nearby park which was a bit awkward to say the least. It was like pitching a tent in the middle of your city park with people playing soccer and tennis just a few feet away.
Our next stop was Villa Maria and our first hotel in Argentina. We noticed a few days back that Melissa's bike has been going through a lot of oil in the last few days. Inspecting the motor it appeared to be coming out of the valve cover seal, a part that was removed prior to the start of the trip. Having a small bottle of gasket maker we decided to pull the valve cover and apply some gasket maker in hopes of fixing the problem....well that didn't work.....at all....in fact it got a whole lot worse.
The next day we decided we would stop in the river town of San Pedro just a few hundred kilometers outside of Buenos Aires, en route we stopped for some gas and to check the oil levels on the bike and when looking at Melissa's bike we noticed that not just a little oil was leaking out but oil was now spraying out of the engine. We definitely opened a can of worms with our gasket maker "fix". Oil was now leaking out of the seal, dripping down the engine and catching air and spraying all over Melissa's pant leg and the rest of the motor. San Pedro was too small of a town to find parts so we just decided to do some internet research to locate a parts store in Buenos Aires and stop on our way into town.
The roads between central Argentina and Buenos Aires are a lot like driving I-90 in through Washington. The highway is flanked by large vegetable and wheat farms, the speed limit is rippin at 80mph and there is a steady cross wind blowing. Argentinian drivers take a lot of pride in their ability to overtake a car, or motorcycle in our case, as closely as possible leaving only a few inches between bumpers all while traveling at 80+mph. There has been quite a bit of emotion flowing as we near the end of our motorcycle adventure. Our plan is to sell the motorcycles to other travelers in Buenos Aires and continue traveling by bus for the next month or two. It's going to be a very sad day when we have to watch someone else ride off in to the sunset on the motorcycles that have taken us so far.
Tomorrow we will head into Buenos Aires to look for some parts for Sparkles and meet with some other travelers looking to buy our motorcycles. Cross your fingers.