Oh my goodness... what happened?

So, obviously I have been SO BAD about posting... it has been almost a month! I am sorry!

It has been an exciting one though, and we've been learning lots, taking it all in.

We leave to come home in 8 days... my gosh, where did the time go?

I will certainly fill you in on all the details soon, but for now let me leave you with a few pictures from current times.

Jon and I are traveling in Northern Argentina.

We're in Salta right now; we just got in at about 10:30 last night, and we're on our way to Cafayate this morning. Here's a shot from our trip from Salta to Humahuaca:

We went to Iruya, which was amazingly beautiful, but freaked me completely out being so very far away from all the people I love with no way to contact you... even though I don't talk to you all the time, I didn't realize it makes me feel so much better just to know that I CAN if I want to... We had an amazing time in Humahuaca first, which is stunning.

There is a type of mountain within the mountain ranges here in the north called the Quebradas de las Conchas... they look like an afghan I remember Mugsy having when we were little... You really can't see the colors so well in this photo, but they are big stripes and triangles of pink, red, white, blue, yellow, violet... seven colors, apparently.

(Quebradas are pronounced kay-bra-duhs... and Concha, out of context, is slang for vagina or vulva or something... all I know is you're really NOT supposed to say it. Apparently, though, when referring to these mountains it's a-ok.) We visited some amazing mountains, some ruins,

went hiking around... we stood on top of a 4,000 meter high mountain peak (the bus stopped there for 5 minutes so the driver could get out and smoke on the way to Iruya).

In Iruya the whole town is nestled in the middle of NOWHERE- I kid you not. Nowhere. And it's on a steep (mostly desert) hillside- so beautiful! (Unfortunately I don't have any pictures from Iruya on my computer yet, so I'll have to post them later...)

Just walking up the hill makes me so out of breath because of the altitude... it was strange to have my legs feel fine, but my lungs were like "holy heck, what are you DOING to me?"

We had planned to go farther North to the border of Bolivia to a tiny town called Yavi, but we met some new friends named Luli and Nico, travelers from Buenos Aires (Argentines who are also fluent in English), and they recommended that we take our time left and head South to some of the other towns they found amazing.

Since we had so many things in common with them (like the fact that we like to seek out physical and natural world adventures in small towns rather than visit cities and stay in crazy busy hostels etc) we decided to change up our plans.

And here we are! We will go to Cafayate today, and stay for a couple days. Apparently we can rent bikes there and bike to waterfalls, indigenous paintings, and vineyards... and there are amazing Quebradas to see too.

And then we head to Tafi for a day before going on to Tucuman to catch the bus back to Buenos Aires. We come home so soon!

I can't wait to see you all!