“Turns out not where but who you’re with that really matters.”

This is perhaps my favorite single line from Dave Matthews. Ironic considering how rarely I seem to apply it. More ironic still is how apropos it appears today considering how much she hates that band and how much I miss her.

What’s worse is how I managed to meet someone I’m fired up about who is truly fired up about me just a few short months before I was to leave on this cross-continental adventure. And as I am frequently reminded by so many, apparently this kind of vacation is tragically out of reach of most. At least not without a good half decade of planning and pining and pacing for it.

Regardless, that’s a story that’s been told and told and told.

As was inevitable, she left today. I took her to the airport in Bariloche where a plane was waiting for her. Somewhere, sometime, after no less than four airports and roughly sixteen hours in the air, Lord knows how many hours in the airports, she will find herself back in Southern California where with any luck my car is waiting to bring her to San Diego where her home and her job and perhaps most importantly her cat is waiting, probably impatiently, for her return.

What has been waiting for me is a desperately silent room that feels simultaneously barren and crushingly claustrophobic. A room I suspected was bound to be waiting for me when she agreed to accompany me on this first leg of my sabbatical. That said, I have no regrets and certainly wouldn’t have changed a moment of this experience. It’s strange. I wonder if knowing the end in advance makes things any easier. Sure, there is no surprise. No shock. But there is also that emotional pall. That sense of foreboding that lurks and grows deep behind the eyes you stare into every night at dinner.

But for just those nights with those eyes I would have endured a thousand goodbyes. Argentina would never have been the same experience without that someone to share it with.

Someone who could decipher rapidly spoken Spanish far faster than I could, despite my experience speaking it. No surprise there, really. I’ve always been better at talking than listening.

She would have to be a far better listener simply to put up with my tiresome babble for two weeks.

Either that or stone deaf.

I’ve spent the last two weeks developing increasingly elaborate plans to keep her here indefinitely. Not surprisingly, my battle cry of “we don’t need no stinking money!” had little effect. We may not need money, but apparently mortgages do. I tried bribery, but as I all could really offer was some secondhand fleece and the occasional shinny bauble purchased from any of the scruffy, bearded vendors lining Argentine plazas, it wasn’t enough to compensate for a career lost. I recommended a luxury cat carrier and a fiver slipped to the UPS guy in order to get her beloved cat to Argentina post haste, but this was met with outright scorn.

I finally resorted to crime with an elaborate kidnap scheme involving a rogue gang of Marxist llama herders and a big, ventilated steamer trunk, but I didn’t like the idea of smuggling my sweetie as a stowaway in steerage on a boat full of drunken Russian sailors. That scenario could only end with her in the captain’s cabin and me frantically paddling a slowly sinking trunk back toward South America.

In the end, logic, not emotion prevailed.

We spent the last few days somewhat aimlessly in Bariloche whose Patagonian winds have blessed us with weather comparable to even the best days in Southern California. The sun has been shining through near cloudless skies of blue, a blue only rivaled by the lake that stretched out for miles beneath it. We walked along the shore of Lake Huapi, sat on the end of a decaying concrete pier and looked out toward the mountains and gazed through the clear, clean water to the smooth, round rocks that shimmered and wiggled beneath the near waveless lake. We built cairns along the rocky shore, decorating the beach with dozens of our temporary tributes to the spires in the distance that inspired them.

This far south the sun rises slowly and sets at the same leisurely pace of the people who live here, and by three in the afternoon, Bariloche was positively warm. Soon the pebbled shores of the lake were covered with exposed skin that only days before was wrapped tightly in fleece. We changed into bathing suits, cooked ourselves under the mountain sun, watched as it reflected across the surface of the lake like a million flashbulbs, and cooled off again in the shockingly cold water of Lake Huapi.

We hiked eight kilometers up a dusty, steep trail to the summit of Cerro Otto, discovered still more suitable crags for climbing, of course adding to our regrets at not bringing any gear, ate a late lunch with a truly decadent chocolate torta as reward for the two hour climb, and finally returned to the road via the gondola. My knees are still grateful for that luxury. My friends would mock me for taking the easy way down, but when presented with the choice of getting smoochy in the gondola or sore and swollen on the trail, the decision was easy. Best four dollars I ever spent. We had dinner and champagne and yet another truly decadent desert of chocolate fondue and fell asleep sunburned and exhausted and intoxicated from the hike and the wine and the meal.

I am more than likely staying in Bariloche for a day or so more of hiking, then, time permitting, leaving for El Bolson, the counter-culture capitol of Argentina, before flying to Calafate. I am flying solo from here on out, at least until I meet up with old friends in Brazil in March, or until some other intrepid souls I find along the way decide I’m tolerable company. Finding either saintly-patient or stone-deaf backpackers in remote corners of South America seems unlikely, so I’m betting on a lot of time for introspection.

Maybe this is for the best. Months ago my ex wrote me a somewhat surprising letter regarding my regular lamentations about the decision to jump ship and travel. She recommended traveling alone. Funny because with all the unsolicited and frequently unwelcome advice I receive as a result of this website, this was in fact both a valid and welcome suggestion from the one person who had been the least warmly discussed subject on my blog whose name didn’t begin with “George” or end with "Bush."

I didn’t completely agree with her, but as she does know me better than most anyone else reading my self-promoting drivel, she did have a point. By traveling alone perhaps I’ll be forced the confront some of the demons that have been clawing at me for too long. Maybe the isolation of Patagonia will remind me that my largely self-created frustrations were either frivolous or fantasy or both. Maybe the cold winds will erode my insecurities leaving a more confident and capable man. Or maybe it isn’t more time staring inside but gazing outside that I really need.

If that’s the case then the panoramic views in Patagonia seem as good a place as any to begin.

But in the end I think I would prefer to have someone to share those views with me. And right now her view is of South America from 35,000 feet.