Cafayate

Cafayate is a few hours south of Salta. You cross through a desert on the way there. The town is pretty small and is in a pretty dry valley, but with a real river and several creeks coming down from the Andes around the town.





The town itself is really pleasant.

We stayed at the Rusty K Hostel. If you're in Cafayate, I can't recommend you stay there enough. It is great. They have bikes there to ride around town and to the surrounding wineries. Also, they have a really nice and really pleasant courtyard where you can hang out and use their parilla grill. The courtyard has a cool retractable roof and is otherwise covered overhead in grapes that you can pick and eat at your leisure.






There are wineries right in and just outside of town. They're growing grapes all over.


They are also growing goats!

There's a goat cheese farm right outside of town that we walked to. When we got there, a lady was just driving out and told us the place was closed for a couple hours, but if we wanted to go visit the goats, we could go right ahead. Great!

So we hung out with the goats for a while.


They also had a couple llamas hanging out there.

It was really hot though, so we got tired of waiting and walked back to town up a creek that runs by the goat farm.



There was some donkey representation as well:



We visted several wineries in and around town.



For a few days there we just rode bikes around, went to wineries, barbequed at the hostel and had some fantastic food. We found this restaurant that ended up being owned by a couple from Colorado.

It was definitely a top 5 meal on the whole trip.




One day we rode up the hill outside of town to a couple wineries and to hang out in the creeks up at the opening of a canyon.



It was really, really hot that day. Naomi didn't think she was going to make it.



But she did, so we took some wine that we got at a winery, put it in water bottles, and hung out in the creek most of the day. That was a really good day.





There's another little town in that area, Cachi, that is supposed to be cool also, but we ended up spending all our time down there in Cafayate. If you're in NW Argentina, you should at least to go to one of them.

After Cafayate, we headed back to Salta for a night, and another feast at the Inti Huasi, and then we were to head over the Andes and leave Argentina for the trip.



In real time, here's what I hope the M's lineup ends up looking something like:

2B Figgins
RF Ichiro
LF Bay (and Vlad)
DH Vlad Guererro (and Griffey)
1B Branyan and Gomes platoon
CF Guittierez
3B Beltre (but I can live with Hall/Tui)
SS Wilson
C Johnson/Moore

Felix
Sheets
mystery pitcher we trade Morrow and Lopez for
RRS
Snell