Buenos Aires doesn’t have surf. So why do I live here?
I have become a weekend warrior.
If you surf, you will know what I mean.
As a kid with time on my hands, I’d hit the beach as much as possible: before school, after school and every now and again at lunch. This was Los Angeles and the surf was frequent enough to warrant checking it out on the way to school. I wasn’t too picky. Nor were most of my friends. We just wanted to get out there in the surf. We had few qualms about ditching school if the surf was good.
Then came the weekend and the crowds. Big crowds. We called them weekend warriors and we’d pine for Monday to come so that we could have it on our own again – or at least with fewer people. Then the weekend warriors would be back in their business suits or on the construction site or behind the counter, and the surf, no doubt, would be bigger and better.
I live in Buenos Aires now, a four-hour drive from the nearest surf.
The trouble is that for two years and three months I lived in Pinamar on the coast of Argentina, a place that my wife and three children and I came to call a pine tree paradise for the slow life, fine surf and pine forests.
That was three and a half years ago.
To get there and back now, I have to load the family in the car and face the Friday and Sunday night traffic jams and the flash-happy tailgating dicks doing 160 km/hour thinking that they are bitchin. We have become weekend warriors in our very own pine tree paradise.
I told a surfer friend in Pinamar of my plight.
It was a Sunday afternoon after a weekend without much surf to speak of, and he nodded in understanding.
Then he smiled broadly and said, “You should be here tomorrow. It’s going to be perfect.”
I drove back to the big city in a grumpy mood.
