I have mentioned before Steve’s quest to catch a fish every month until he dies, or becomes too decrepit to fish. Inspiring introduction to this post, isn’t it? Living in the northern hemisphere gives us challenges to catching fish in the winter. Steve of course, could take up ice fishing, and sit on an overturned bucket all day in sub freezing temperatures to catch fish. However, Sexy Steve was hooked by me and the rest is history. A lifetime of Excellent Adventures, gradually leading to stays at places where Billionaires and President’s like to visit was not even a glimmer in Steve’s temporal lobes when he met me! Hmm, how did Steve get this new nickname? Well, I tried Lucy Steve, but that didn’t match so I needed to come up with an S description. I could have tried suave, but that is too hard to spell so Sexy Steve it is, at least for this post!
So how did we find out about Arroyo Verde? First of all, for someone like me who can’t roll her r’s it is horrific to pronounce. Also, the Argentinians replace the Y with a J. So this estancia has a name pronounced as follows: A-rrrrrrrrrrow-joe Verrrrrrrrr-day. It means green creek. I think Arroyo Verde sounds much better, don’t you?
Last year I was reading Garden & Gun, (definitely not a magazine most Northerners who don’t shoot would read, but that’s another day’s post). I came upon an article about Fly Fishing in Patagonia, I slipped a post-it note on it for Steve, “Would you like to go here?”. Well Sexy Steve is not Stupid Steve, he of course posted a note back to me “Yes!” I contacted the travel agent mentioned in the article, requesting a stay covering the period February to March 2018. That way Sexy Steve could catch a fish in February and March on one trip. In re-reading the article since the trip I realized that we in fact went to only one of the Estancias mentioned. However if we had gone to the first Estancia I would have missed Tipiluke and all my wonderful friends that I met there!
The ranch is owned by the Lariviere family. Originally the Estancia covered the whole valley. The Traful river divides the valley in two. In 1997 Ted Turner bought half of the Estancia, which is called La Primavera, that was 9000 acres. Arroyo Verde is the northern section of the ranch. It is about 10,000 acres. Ted is quite elderly now, and not well, he hasn’t come to see the ranch in a few years, but his caretaker has cameras that warn him if any of the anglers step onto Ted’s side of the river.
We were greeted by Katrina, who is the manager of the ranch. The ranch is now owned by Meme Lariviere and her four daughters. Katrina is from Scotland and has wonderful stories to tell. It was fascinating to hear of her excellent adventures! Steve and Katrina are outside our 1 bedroom suite. Katrina is telling Steve where the main house is. 
This is the outside. Originally this was the stable and tack room. It was renovated a very long time ago!
Would you like to come inside? Of course you would!
Steve has already brought the bags in, I had better get those pictures taken quick before the room gets all messed up. 
This is the view from my side of the bed. There was a big post in the center of the room. I was nervous each night that I would run into it if I had to go to the bathroom. I was lucky and missed it every time. The striped chair is where I would sit and try to do my blog posts. It took a long time due to the wifi. Once again we had no cell service. The phone plan that we had was a waste of money. However, if we didn’t get it, we likely would have had cell service and accidentally run up humongous roaming charges, not realizing we had our phones on! 
Here is Steve unpacking, I prefer to live out of my suitcase. 
Here are the set of ram’s horns that were used as a hat rack. I get a headache just looking at them!
The bathroom was quite large. We had a toilet, a bidet, and a tub with shower. There was plenty of hot water for us. 
We were quite pleased that there were American style outlets to charge our devices. No problems with trying to find our converters.
