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Wednesday, May 16, 2018

Tough Concrete Work - 17 April 2018


17 April 2018 – Before I left I took the Monarch Butterfly outside and put it on a branch in one of the trees. Hopefully, he likes the tree better than the hotel room. This hotel I found not to be user friendly. I paid more money for less than the hotel a day earlier. I will leave Santa Rosa, Corrienties, Argentina and drive to Jardin America, Misiones, Argentina. I’m hoping to have good luck finding a hotel.

Once I arrived in town, I couldn’t find my hotel of choice so I asked a couple of young lads if they knew where it was. One of the guys jumped on his motorcycle and guided me over to it. It was on the opposite side of the road. It wasn’t that visible to me. I pulled up and parked. I looked around and it kind of looked closed. I rang the doorbell a couple of times and no one answered. I walked over to the lumber business next door to the hotel. I asked one of the guys about the hotel. He said it was closed. I really liked this hotel and its layout.

I’m off to my second choice……..Hotel America. It wasn’t brand new but you couldn’t beat the price and it was clean. It also had secure parking which I wasn’t sure about when I was checking it out online. I carried all my bags upstairs and then was oiling my chain. A couple of friendly guys curious about motorcycle stopped by and started asking questions. I told them about my motorcycle travels and whatever else they wanted to know about my motorcycle. I gave them a card with my blog addresses on and showed them how to look them up in Google. We took some pictures and they left. They told me that they had to get going because their mothers or girlfriends were getting tired of standing around. We talked for more than 30 minutes.

I continued oiling my chain and emptied the can of spray of chain oil. It was brand new when I left Minnesota. I also washed my head light, tail light and signal lights. They were still dirty from the rain and muddy wet road down near Ushuaia, Argentina. I rode my motorcycle over to the secure parking. It was maybe 100 Yards / 100 Meters away. I found a safe spot out of the way of car parking and covered it up. The usual routine.

The secure parking area was inside a new addition they’re putting on the hotel. There will be rooms with showers, beds etc. The inside concrete work is maybe 1/8 to 1/4 completed. That’s not a big deal but how it was being completed totally blew me away. The crew was working on the 3rd floor and all concrete was mixed there. The bags of concrete were carried on their backs up 6 flights of stairs. They did that about twice an hour. All the sand was pulled up to the 3rd floor. They had a tripod built with a single pulley, rope and a 5 gallon pail. The guy on the ground floor filled the 5 gallon bucket, set the bucket under the pulley, took the slack out the rope, then took a run and pulled the pail up about 5 yard / 5 meters and then hand over hand pulled it to the 3rd floor. When it got to the 3rd floor the guy would grab it, unhook it, dump the pail and send it down the empty. This went on till the pile of sand was on the 3rd floor or they went home for the day. I believe they had one cubic yard / one cubic meter of sand on the floor when I was watching. I’m sure it was 2 cubic yards / 2 cubic meters of sand when they started. I had to check and see how much that pail of sand weighed. I guessed it weighed between 35 and 45 pounds / 16 and 20 Kilograms. I saw the guy on the rope pull up over 10 buckets of sand. Is there anybody out there who wants to volunteer to hoist sand for a day? That young guy on the rope was in pretty good shape.

I went back to the hotel. After 8:00 p.m. I came down stairs and went to the restaurant. Mary told me it was a Brazilian Steak House. They had a salad buffet and then they came around with steak, pork and chicken on a skewer. They slice off any quantity of meat you desired. I will tell you I ate my fill of salad and all three meats. That hands down was the best meal I had eaten since I left the United States.

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