Anticipating Argentina

First blog post ever. It's a bit daunting, because I feel like I should be witty or interesting, and I know I'll be neither. This will set the tone for the entire blog, and will most likely ensure that only my family and friends will read it. That's fine with me - the main reason for starting this in the first place is so that I only have to tell the stories once. If someone asks me how my trip went, I'll just tell them to read the blog.

So here goes:

We're not there yet. We'll be leaving in just two weeks. Aside from purchasing plane tickets, renting an apartment, and ensuring that we have non-expired passports, C & I have not really done anything to prepare for this trip. And the list of things to take care of has started stacking up:

• New mouse infestation discovered in the house, now that our cat is gone (that'll be a post for another day, I guess.) Don't want to poison the place and have a bunch of dead mice rotting in the walls. But traps need ongoing maintenance to keep them baited and to remove the captured ones. Is that really something we could ask a friend to do while we're away?
• On that subject, we still need to figure out who is going to keep an eye on our house. Would love to have someone live here while we're gone. Reached out to a friend and to C's brother. Haven't heard back from the brother, and it's been a while since we talked with the friend. I'm confident we'll work something out, but not sure if we'll actually get a taker on living in the place.
• For some dumb reason we decided to do a Halloween party this weekend, so we've been focusing on that instead of finalizing travel plans. And then we'll be needing to clean the place up, pull down all the decorations, etc. 
• Should we plan a side trip or two? Beach town? Wine country? Glacier? Should we do that before we go?
• Oh, yeah, what about trying to learn Spanish? Could we learn enough in two weeks to make it worth the effort? (Yes, we did take a a 10-week beginner course, but that was more than a year ago. Every time I try to use it, French starts coming out instead.)
• Find a tango instructor before we go? Or just head out to milongas and see which ones we like?

I'm definitely excited about the trip, and I think we'll have a great time once we're there. And we'll have enough time that we can plan some things after we get situated. But still, four weeks is short enough that I want to make sure we don't waste the first week just trying to figure out what to do.

Well, I've squandered enough time on this very unimportant task, and need to get cracking on some of that party prep. I might publish one more pre-flight post, and then the real fun begins. 

Ciao!