Picture This: Argentina: Day Trippin': Colonia del Sacramento, Uruguay

We took a fantastic excursion one day to the UNESCO World Heritage Sight, Colonia del Sacramento, across the Rio de la Plate in Uruguay. It's a small, historic town founded by the Portugese, and today is surrounded by vacation homes of wealthy Argentinians. There's miles of sandy beaches, which I suspect is the main allure.

One of the best parts of the trip was actually getting to cross the river. Not that it was scenic or anything, but because it's just so huge. It's hard to believe you're on a river, not the ocean. The Rio de la Plate is the confluence between the Rio Uruguay and Rio Parana, and it's 140 miles wide at it mouth. 140 miles! It's nearly as wide as it is long; indeed, it is the widest river in the world. It took an hour to cross it on the high-speed ferry. The slow ferry takes two hours, and if you're sailing it yourself, it's a minimum of five hours from Buenos Aires to Colonia. Cool.

Portón de Campo – the City Gate and wooden drawbridge

We arrived and were treated to a guided tour of Colonia and its outlying areas, and then were cut loose for the remainder of the afternoon. My pals Patty, Gerald and I hired a golf cart so that we could drive out to revisit some of the outlying areas before exploring the town itself. We hit sights like beaches, an abandoned and decaying bull ring, the local hipodromo (horse race track)... basically just puttered along. When we got back into town, our puttering turned into Mr. Toad's Wild Ride - a golf cart on cobblestone streets... not exactly smooth! But we saw the charming town, I took far too few photos, and then the day was done. Just like that, we were back on the boat, BsAs bound.