A Very Special Visitor

We recently had the great pleasure of spending a few weeks on our adventure with Laura’s mum, Maria Carmen. She joined us in Buenos Aires and departed from Montevideo in Uruguay. Those are the bare facts, but digging a little deeper tells us much more about our journey together.

When we first mentioned to Maria Carmen about our plans to travel in South America as a family, she was a little taken aback. Nonetheless, she was very supportive and confident that we would make the right decisions for our children and family. When we broached the subject of her coming to visit us during the trip, she was again initially a little unsure. While she had travelled around Spain and other parts of Europe, and even spent a few days in New York once upon a time, the thought of jetting off by herself to South America, and to spend time traveling in a campervan with the four of us, definitely set many an alarm bell ringing in her head.

However, to her great credit, she is an open-minded person, always willing to take the advice of those around her. So we set-out to dispel any limiting beliefs she had about her ability to make it to us, and to affirm the confidence required to then enjoy the whole experience.

So a few days into the New Year, from the comfort of our campervan sofa, we began WhatsApp video calls to iron out dates, places and itineraries. Once we knew the dates Maria Carmen had to travel, and our own rough itinerary (it is always very rough!!), we honed in on places that we thought she would like to visit. The south of Brazil was mentioned, Iguazu Falls were discussed, North Argentina was alluded to and Paraguay was debated. However, in the end, the appeal of Argentina’s iconic capital city and it’s (relatively) tiny but beautiful neighbour Uruguay, held too much appeal.

So with flights duly booked, we eagerly awaited our first visitor of the trip. Life being life, the four of us picked up a stomach bug in the few days before Maria Carmen’s visit. Thankfully, we had decided to put the campervan in for some running repairs and modernization while in Buenos Aires. This meant we would be renting AirBnB’s in the city centre for a couple of weeks.

As the aforementioned stomach bug passed between our family prior to her arrival, we enjoyed the comfort of the apartment to rest and recover. It was quite unfortunate that Laura herself only caught the bug late in the week, meaning that she was far from 100% the day her mum was due to be met at the airport. To add to this, Maria Carmen was due to arrive at the precise moment that we had to vacate one rental apartment and check into another (what timing!). Throw in near 40 degree Buenos Aires summer temperatures, two recovering children and a stressed-out father, and you might get a sense of moods that morning…

All this was forgotten by the time the kids met their “Lala” in the Palermo district of Buenos Aires that morning. It was so nice to see such unadulterated joy all-round. Bags were tossed to one side as tales of travel, trips and toys (yes Christmas had only recently passed!) were recounted to her. Like always, she took everything that morning in her stride and settled into her little piece of life on the road. The next days were spent exploring the city, seeing sights, eating well and generally just soaking up the atmosphere of such a vibrant and energetic place.

Following our stays in Buenos Aires apartments, we took our newly glammed-up campervan and headed towards Uruguay. Life in such a small space is challenging with a family of four. Adding in a fifth person, 20kg bag and all, brings with it more opportunities to find solution after solution! But find solutions we did of course. Patience certainly helped, and credit must go to our visitor who for me was the most patient of us all.

Uruguay proved to be an instant success, with wonderful time spent together travelling through the countryside, in the beautiful town of Colonia de Sacramento, and throughout the cosmopolitan capital Montevideo. We even managed to arrange the campervan in such a way that we could all travel comfortably, eat and sleep together with relative ease.

Dropping Maria Carmen to the airport for her flight home was quite emotional for us all. We had been hoping to spend time with a loved one and she had been hoping to enjoy the company of family she had been missing dearly. Yet I think we all felt a significant amount of pride and satisfaction in what had happened over the previous three weeks. Preconceptions had been crushed, beliefs about what could or could not be achieved had been silenced, and hope for what could be achieved in the future had been cemented. If nothing further was to be achieved from this trip, I think we could all pack-up and go home happily.