Twenty-six hours on a bus from Bariloche down toward El Calafate, along the spine of Patagonia, in the kind of late-summer light that makes you forgive almost anything. We needed the forgiveness. Twenty-six hours is a long time to be a body in a seat.

Ines is five now — that happened on this trip, somewhere between two countries, with a cake we improvised out of alfajores and a single candle borrowed from a hostel. Five is a different traveler than four. She'll narrate a four-hour stretch of empty steppe without pausing for breath, but she also notices things now: a lone guanaco against the hills, the exact moment the lakes turn that impossible glacial blue, the fact that the man across the aisle had been asleep "for basically the whole planet."

The landscape did the heavy lifting. Patagonia doesn't perform for you; it just is, enormous and indifferent, and somewhere around hour eighteen — wind hammering the windows, nothing but ochre and sky to the horizon — all three of us went quiet at the same time, which almost never happens.

The bus itself was cama class, seats that recline nearly flat, and we will say this plainly: a good long-distance Argentine bus is more comfortable than most short-haul flights we've ever taken. We arrived stiff and a little unhinged and completely, stupidly happy.

Glaciers next, then slowly north again as the season turns.

— Tomas, Amara & Ines