PowerCycle

10/28 Sweating to death here in La Rioja. Hit 105 F while I was riding around hotel hunting. No AC in the room at the hostel. There’s a fan but I need the only plug to charge my laptop. Priorities.

Took the 38 out of Catamarca. I’d done some research on this route since towns and villages can be kind of scarce and just because something is on the map doesn’t mean it’s still there. CGOAB helped since other cyclists have taken this highway. I knew from a couple journals that I’d be running into a few dead cows along the road and a memorial for a fellow cyclist. The cows had turned into skeletons but there were plenty of other stinky dead animals. Dogs for one thing but I didn’t shed any tears. As for live things I saw lot’s of hawks and an armadillo (first one down south). I did see the cyclist memorial but I didn’t stop and take pictures. After about 60 miles I was done thanks to a nagging headwind. I found a shady spot off the road a ways in a dried up river bed.

No shoulder on the 2 lane highway but traffic isn’t bad and everyone moves over. Something goes by about every minute and there are occasional long breaks in between. There’s a restaurant/gas station at Chumbicha with water/soda for sale. At the junction for route 9 there’s a place selling local fruit and the girl hooked me up with water.

I’ve been having a great time with my other bank, BB&T. I have a loan with them as well as a checking and savings account. Since I never use them for anything (because of their fees–kind of ironic) I have no reason to look at the bank statement they email me every month. Well that turned out to be a dumb move on my part. It seems that they’ve been charging me a dormant account fee on my savings for a year now (why they didn’t also charge me for the checking account I have no idea and didn’t ask). That’s added up to about $105 that they’ve been pulling from my savings.

You’d think getting a dormant account status changed would be easy while you’re on the road in Argentina with limited internet access for Skype calls but you’d be wrong. Since the accounts are frozen I can’t use the ATM to unfreeze them or make any transfers online. Looks like they’ll be getting another $7.50 out of me for October at this rate. They did say I could mail them checks for small amounts from my other bank and they’d deposit them and change the status. I did that almost a month ago and can see that the checks arrived there but they didn’t do anything with them (including deposit them in my account).

GPX track