IGUACU NATIONAL PARK, Brazil — When we reached the elegant Hotel Tropical das Cataratas early one Saturday afternoon last fall, its charming pink facade was shrouded in a thick, soupy fog. More sensible travelers might have settled into the leather sofas in front of the Belvedere Room fireplace and waited out the weather with a tumbler of Scotch. I have to admit that was tempting.

But my two friends and I were on a very tight schedule; we had a long weekend, less than 80 hours, in South America. We couldn't let bad weather stop us.

We scrambled across the road to the edge of a cliff high above the Rio Iguacu, squinted into the misty curtain and prepared to be dazzled, like the first European explorers in 1541, by the majesty of Iguacu Falls.

The full-throated sound of rushing water was unmistakable and tantalizing. Yet we couldn't see a thing.

So we did the only thing we could do: We began to laugh at our bad luck. We took turns posing for photographs in front of the curtain of mist, our camera flashes ricocheting back at us, capturing the irony of this invisible wonder of the world.

Then, slowly, the mist began to break. Clumps of clouds rolled past, offering glimpses of small waterfalls. As we began hiking along the cliff's edge, we saw ever-larger spans of the cascading water. It appeared as if the lush jungle plateau had suddenly sprung dozens of leaks: Water raced over and around mossy islands and leafy trees, leaping into the air before plunging deep into the gorge. Some chutes were gushing spigots just a few feet across; others spanned hundreds of feet.

I found myself wondering: Just how big was this thing?

To get here, we had traveled 8,000 miles in just under 48 hours — in taxis, buses and three planes. But it wasn't as though we had planned this for months. The three of us — all fathers of teenagers — had mapped out the journey less than two weeks earlier.

Our guidelines for this and similar trips were pretty simple: The destination had to be exotic, and it had to include a visit to something none of us had seen before. It also had to be a place that our spouses didn't mind our visiting without them (Paris and London were out), and it had to be done quickly, so we were back before anyone knew we were gone.

My traveling companions were Richard Goetz and Steve Stathatos, lawyers and fellow Southern California dads. These soccer dad escapes weren't "vacations" in the traditional sense, because we didn't kick back and relax in hopes of recharging our batteries. Rather, they were delicious journeys of discovery, taken at breakneck speed and stolen from busy work and home lives.

Our journey to Iguacu Falls was planned for maximum adventure in minimum time.

Although we were somewhat price-conscious, we also knew we weren't going to be there long, so when faced with the choice of spending a little extra money to save time, we did it. We chose luxury hotels on the rationale that we would be spending two nights on airplanes. We booked separate rooms for maximum comfort. We arranged for drivers to whisk us around. And the unwritten rule of our road was carry-on baggage only; we couldn't afford to waste precious minutes waiting for checked luggage or porters. (The final tab, including airfare, was about $2,500 apiece.)

We left Los Angeles on a Thursday, changed planes in Washington, D.C., and landed in Buenos Aires on a Friday morning, ready to roll. After checking into the elegant Alvear Palace Hotel in the tony Recoleta barrio, we headed out with a car and driver for a quick tour of the city. (Like other things in the city, that was surprisingly affordable — about $10 per hour, which we divided three ways.)

The next morning, we boarded a plane for the two-hour flight north to Iguacu Falls, arriving around noon in a driving rainstorm.

The stunning waterfalls are at the northeastern tip of Argentina, on a tropical thumb of land that pokes into Paraguay and Brazil; the falls themselves are divided between Argentina and Brazil. They are twice as wide as Victoria Falls in Africa and carry more than twice the water of Niagara Falls, in dozens of distinctive cascades in a 2 1/2-mile arc of free-floating rainbows.

Our guidebooks recommended we take in the view from both sides of the border, allowing a half-day for the Brazilian side and a full day for the Argentine side. So we arranged for a hotel car and driver to take us across the border to the entrance to Brazil's Parc Nacional do Iguacu.

We paid our admission fee in the visitor's center and climbed onto a double-decker park bus, which stopped at spots for guided hikes, jeep and boat rides. But we waited for the last stop, the Hotel Tropical das Cataratas, which is the best place to begin a self-guided tour of the falls.

As the mist cleared, we strolled about a mile along a narrow paved walkway that hugged the cliffside, pausing periodically to admire the ever-changing view. As we neared the headwaters, the views grew even more dramatic.

Near the end of the trail, we ventured onto a metal catwalk that stretched out over the falls. With the water plummeting beneath us, the deafening Garganta del Diablo (Devil's Throat) cascading behind us, the waves of wind and water buffeting us, we started to get wet. Very wet, despite our rain slickers.

At the end of the trail, a catwalk led to a viewing platform beneath part of the falls. We watched as our fellow tourists raced onto the platform, posing for photographs as the water crashed down on them.

On Sunday, a breezy, cloudless day, we headed for Parque Nacional Iguazu on the Argentina side. My shoes had dried overnight, but I noticed that my leather wristwatch band had started to smell of mildew.

The sun brought out some of the bird and animal life that distinguishes this region. The day before, we had spotted a toucan, one of 400 species of birds in the two parks. Now the air was dancing with butterflies and chattering birds, and the falls conjured up rainbow after rainbow.

The Argentine park offered several trails — the upper circuit, which runs about half a mile along the upper lip of the falls, and the lower circuit, which runs about a mile and gives you the sensation that you're walking amid them, a sensation made real by periodic blasts of water. (A third trail, which includes a metal walkway right on top of the Garganta del Diablo, was closed, as it frequently is, because of high water.)

The boat trip up the river to the falls was sold out for the afternoon, so we hiked along the 2 1/2-mile Macuco Nature Trail, which winds through the forest and ends at a small waterfall that trips into a pool. There, hardy groups of tourists shed their outerwear and splashed around in the waist-deep water. We paused, probably longer than we should have, to watch them. They asked us to take photographs of them with their cameras, and we happily obliged.