Surprisingly good breakfast

I think I slept pretty well last night. I had the remote control to the air conditioner in bed with me, and I actually got cold enough at one point that I had to set the temperature a little higher so I wouldn’t freeze. That’s exactly where I wanted it to be.

a white plate with an omelette, some salsa, a plastic cup with refreid black beans, part of an avocado, a slice of cheese, and some fried bananas and sweet cream

Omelette breakfast with platanos fritos

We were prepared to eat the granola from the Super Veinticuatro for breakfast this morning, despite Ty telling us multiple times that the snack shack in the middle of the swimmin pool complex was a real restaurant. Charmaine went over to the snack shack to buy a licuado and to see if she could pay with a credit card. They charge 6% extra to pay with a credit card, so she asked if she could pay at the end of the day for all the drinks and they said yes. She wondered what kinds of drinks they had and they handed her a menu. It was a big menu. And it had real food listed in it. Then she saw they were cooking breakfast for other people in the kitchen there. And immediately our vacation from our vacation changed for the better.

Instead of granola, we had pancakes and omelets for breakfast. This was a fantastic discovery. Between the excellent air conditioning and the great food, I made up my mind that this is a great place to spend a weekend in Guatemala.

A full day of swimming

Jack told us he had a “full day” today. There was a lot of swimming that needed to be done. And that’s exactly what we did. We swam a lap or two around the big pool complex. We swam in the ocean again. The ocean swimming experience was much better today. There was a sand bar about 20 feet wide yesterday, but it was about 200 feet wide today. That resulted in waves we could ride for 200 feet as they came toward shore. We pretty much had the beach to ourselves, too. It was really fun. There were a bunch of really tiny jellyfish swimming with us making us tingle. The kids didn’t like that, so they went back to the pool pretty quickly, but the rest of us had a great time.

a cold Piña colada in a clear plastic cup with some cinnamon and a cherry on top

Virgin piña colada

We played around in the pools and played games at our condo until it was well past lunch time. The kids were getting hangry so we made our way back to the snack shack for “linner”. One of the big items on the menu is pizza. Several kids ordered pizzas. At that point they told us they don’t make the pizzas at the shack, they order them in from somewhere else and it takes about 90 minutes. The kids decided having pizza would be worth the wait, but some of us wanted to eat right away. So we all ordered some great drinks (mostly virgin Piña coladas) and then the kids went with Jess to walk along the beach.

Dinner at the Snack Shack

Dinner turned out really well. I had a chicken panini. Charmaine and Brett had steak. Nate was waiting for pizza, but didn’t go with the kids to the beach. Wisely, he chose to hang out with us at the snack shack and hope for some scraps. We handed him several. But he’s a teen-ager and we knew he would be hungry again long before the pizzas arrived. They told us they would deliver the pizzas directly to our condo. Perfecto.

a woman stands in a shallow swimming pool while the sun sets along the palm filled beach behind her

Sunset overlooking the beach

After dinner we played several rounds of Skyjo with the kids. Pizza arrived and looked pretty good. The crust was very dense and pretty hard, almost like a really thick cracker, but the flavors were good. We didn’t come close to eating all the pizza, so we’ll either have it for lunch tomorrow, or we’ll take it back to Antigua with us. All the sun and swimming must have really taken a lot of our energy because we wrapped up our game playing by 8:30 and got ourselves ready for bed.