A Leak and the Lockdown

We arrived in El Calafate, Argentina, located 1,500 kilometers south of Buenos Aires and only 500 kms north of the southern tip of South America. We are south of 50 degrees in latitude and, at this time of the year, it doesn’t get dark until 11 p.m. Crazy! We headed out to town around 10:30 p.m. to go explore and have a bite to eat at a local parilla. After a nice night out, we head back to our room at about 12:30 a.m. for the night.

We turn the block and our hotel is pitch black.

“No problem. I’m sure our medieval-era key will open the front door,” I say, bravely.

Nope, not a chance. This hotel is locked down as tight as the Alamo. Heather starts knocking and ringing the doorbell as I go around the building to snoop around and see if there is another way in.

We both fail at our attempts to break in and decide we have two options:
1. Sleep on the cozy deck chairs located in the yard.
2. Yell at the open windows to see if we can wake someone up and help us.

We decide on trying number two before sleeping outside. Not wanting to piss everyone off in the hotel, we analyze all of the open windows to see whom we want to wake up. Luckily for us, we see one with the light still on.

“Pardon!”, “Hello!”, “Hola!”, “WAKE UP”, “Is anyone there?!”

A voice from the window finally answers and agrees to go downstairs and unlock the door.

After a slight struggle, he finally unlocks the door and, after thanking him, we head up to our room. As we walk through the small lobby, we almost trip on a couple of buckets filled with water. After a quick inspection with our iPhone flashlight, we realize that the buckets are catching water dripping from the ceiling.

“Huh,” Heather says, “I don’t remember it raining outside. Oh well, let’s just go to bed.”

The next morning at breakfast, the man who rescued us the night before comes up and apologizes to us, explaining, “it took so long for me to answer you as I was in my birthday suit when I heard you out the window!”

As we finished breakfast and headed up to our room, the buckets were still right in the middle of the lobby and we decided to ask the front desk lady what the buckets were all about.

“Oh, its just from a room upstairs,” she said. “They must have taken a shower with the shower curtain outside of the tub.”

We all had a laugh about it and in our minds thought “what an amateur move!” It’s only as we head upstairs that we both realize that our room is right above the buckets.