bike and wine...2 perfect combinations...

on the bus going from santiago, chile to mendoza, argentina...this is what i woke up to...so very beautiful

wine tasting in mendoza, argentina (they have these cool bike and wine tours; which is a great way to see the country through rose colored glasses)

annette and me enjoying the good life...taking a break from the biking to enjoy a great malbec

after leaving santiago, chile we took a minibus and did a border crossing into mendoza, argentina, which is right in the midst of wine country. some of the best wines come out of here, like riojas and malbecs. and as great as these wines are, they are unbelievably cheap. also, argentina is known for their steaks (sorry rania)...i was really looking forward to a great steak and we had an amazing, high quality dinner with a bottle of wine for only 25 dollars...

in mendoza they have different companies that let you rent bikes so you can go and visit the wineries...so we hopped on those bikes and sped away (even annette was happy on the bikes this time)... while we were doing our bikes and wine tour, we realized that it costs 20 pesos (around 7 US dollars) for both of us to do the wine tastings at each vineyard...but it cost 18 pesos (6 US dollars) to just buy a bottle of wine...so being the great mathematicians that we are, we decided to buy that bottle of wine and enjoy it on a nice grassy knoll (at least i think it was a knoll)...the winery we bought this bottle of wine at was called wayna (which means young man or young wine)...we wanted to open it and drink it there, but the guy that worked there told us that he couldn´t let us drink it there, not sure why...but he conspiratorially offered to open the bottle for us and let us drink it outside the gate, which was really pretty nice...and drink we did...

after drinking our wine, we merrily biked away and went to the next place on our tour, a chocolate factory...is there anything better? there we sampled a bit then bought 24 alfajores (dulce de leche cookies, yum!) and ended our tour...quite a lovely way to spend a monday...