ODO: 319,972
Our final office day! Such a short time in the Bay. After a fun dinner with our work friends we head to the airport to wait for our 5am flight (who booked these flights?!). We have some time before security opens, so we find a place to relax, and maybe take a quick nap.
Our 5am put us in Houston for most of the day. We touch down in the midst of a thunderstorm with non-stop lighting. The storm sticks around for most of the day and causes several delays. We board our second and final flight in the early evening, and have a much rougher landing into Guatemala City. We head straight for the truck, and everything looks exactly like we left it, whew. We head to a hotel not far from the airport to recover from the past few days.
In the morning it’s clear to both of us that we need more recovery, so we pay for an additional night. Aiming for maximum rest, we go for a short walk, watch a lot of Netflix, do some work, and find some takeout Chinese food. Just what we need.
Time to get back to adventuring! Kind of…We’re still waiting on those parts from last week so we dont want to go anywhere too far, or down too rough a road. Antigua is the perfect spot, its about an hour away in traffic (38km) down the nicely paved highway. But Google has a different plan for us. It directs us into a small town as a “short cut”. This short cut is narrow road, followed by narrower road, until we can barley make the turns, and dont quite fit anymore. After some manual mapping (thank goodness we both know how to read a map without Google!) we get back on the highway and start to de-stress. We get to our first Guatemalan camp spot: a parking spot on the main road in front of a hostel. Not what we expected from the descriptions on iOverlander, but the location is great so it’ll do. Because we haven’t been in the camper for several days it’s time for a little reorganizing. And we need to put away all of our Amazon purchases. We walk into town for a quick dinner and some wandering. When we get back we are serenaded to sleep by a wedding at the end of the street.
Our small taste of Antigua makes us excited to see more so we spend the entire day walking around. Slowly. The streets are very uneven cobblestones, and the sidewalks are very narrow and window boxes stick out half way across them. We do a small and very random food tour where we discover some decent cookies, and some decent chuchitos (essentially mini tamales). We rack up an impressive 18,946 steps during our exploration, that’s almost ten miles. A mid afternoon nap was a must, after which we walked all the way across town for some BBQ. Some really, really good BBQ. We slept very well.
Today needs to be a rest day for two reasons: yesterday we walked forever, and we are planning to hike the Acatenango Volcano in the next day or so. Even though we only leave to get food, and come right back, we still manage to rack up 8000 steps. We try the pho places and are delightfully surprised. It is hard to find good pho, doubly so in a place with very little Vietnamese food. We also get our monthly maintenance done, which always feels great, and most importantly, our heater still works!
Moving day! We pack our little house and head for groceries on our way to the volcano. The grocery store we find is weirdly fancy, almost like a whole foods. And they have AMAZING grapes! We haven’t had grapes in a long time because they go bad so quickly, this is exciting. After the grocery store KoKo did her first Guatemalan driving, and it was stressful. Lots of slow speeds on steep hills, and very steep hill starts. Not fun with a manual transmission, but we survived. Our camp is at the start of our hike, and it is lovely. We are on the side of a different volcano with a great view and friendly dogs. Obviously we give them treats immediately so they like us. We’re now up at 8500ft so the weather is chilly, a welcome change. We get a neighbor in a tent who is hiking the volcano the day before we plan to, so fingers crossed he comes back with some hot tips for us.
