A long drive day

It continued to rain for most of the night, so we had to put our tents away wet this morning.  The cook group decided not to do eggs this morning, even though we had plenty.  Instead, they warmed up last night's leftover curry and rice.  Needless to say, we passed on that option.

After breakfast, we all mucked in to roll the canopy up.  We were on the road by 6.30am.  We had 580 kilometres to cover today to get to our overnight camping stop in La Posta del Dayman near Salto.

It was a relentless drive.  At least the roads were in good condition - the best out of everywhere we've been in Uruguay.  We marvelled at the brilliant infrastructure for a country with such a small population and a relatively large area.  The road verges are all immaculately cut and extremely clean.  We saw several teams of workers strimming and mowing.  As we noted the other day, people are very proud of their houses and gardens and take good care of them.  Refuse collection seems well-organised and efficient.  

We drove through huge swathes of land given over to growing crops and raising livestock.  There are thousands of acres of vines, cornfields, apple orchards, olive groves, and potato fields.  Uruguay seems like a good place to live.  I need to do some research, though, on whether or not there is a big rich/poor divide.

We had several toilet stops at service stations, all of which had well-stocked shops.  At the first of these, we bought some delicious cheese and ham croissants to make up for the missing breakfast.  

We drove through the town of Trinidad.  In a few days time, we will stay in a town of the same name in Paraguay!

At about 12.30pm, we stopped by a lake in the rain for a truck lunch.  We had cheese and ham salad wraps.  I ate mine on the truck.  I can't believe how much rain we have had since my waterproof jacket was stolen!

It rained on and off all day, so I hardly took any photos.  We arrived at our campsite at around 5pm.  Fortunately, it had dried up, so we were able to put our tents up without any problems.  There was a pool on site that was the temperature of a warm bath.  Several of the group had a soak before dinner.  We sat chatting to Gill and then went to take some photos of the sunset.

Dinner tonight was chicken, crushed potatoes, and couscous with beans and corn.  We went to bed soon afterwards as we have another early start tomorrow.Read more