I wish I could transport back to this magical place, Posada Ayana, in Jose Ignacio Uruguay. A resort filled with beauty, serenity, and the most lovely people. Sure, the journey was a bit tenuous with a nearly missed flight due to passport control taking almost 2 hours to reach the gate in Buenos Aires – luckily we made the flight as nothing is efficient with flying in Argentina. A short 35-minute flight should be relatively uneventful, it was anything but due to severe thunderstorms, an aircraft that had pieces of the internal furniture falling apart, and a bounced landing of a 737 – yikes. Once we landed, immigration took mere minutes, as did the luggage, and we ventured to get our rental car at Hertz. As a long-time Presidents Circle member (thanks to all my work travel), my overseas car rental experiences tend to be quite good. I was treated well, told we received a free upgrade, but that sadly only manual transmission sedans were available. Spoiler alert: I can’t drive a stick! That’s ok – I do enough driving stateside – so off we went. The “upgrade” we received was nothing short of bizarre – not only was there nothing automatic or electronic in the car aside from the radio, it lacked CarPlay which would make navigation a major challenge. The window crank, the lack of power steering – all became hilarious over time. We had a 30 minute drive well-past midnight to make it to our hotel in Montevideo in the DRIVING rain – which made the poor excuse of windshield wipers quite laughable. The tenuous journey lasted an hour, yet we made it unscathed. We stayed at the lovely aLoft in an upscale area of Montevideo for the night. Then, in the morning we took off for the 2.5 hour drive north, along the Uruguayan coastline, towards Jose Ignacio. It was a beautiful drive and an even more stunning destination.
One of the most amazing things about our seaside resort, Posada Ayana, was the sunscape installation. Neither of us had ever heard of it – and I will write a post about the surreal experience as well as meeting the Austrian owner of the resort. Our room was phenomenal, the resort was breathtaking, and the sunsets even more so. A much appreciated experience despite the rental car and traveling horrors. I will be back to this awesome resort!
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