Car Rental

We drove from Quito to Baños by way of Quilotoa today. When the plan was originally pitched, I thought Quilotoa was (mostly) “on the way” to Baños. When you’re zoomed out far enough on Google Maps, the detour from Latacunga to Quilotoa doesn’t look like a big deal, but it’s a narrow, super windy road through the high mountains with a lot of steep ups and downs. It added an extra 3 hours to the drive (plus the amount of time we spent in Quilotoa). We wound up spending most of the day driving with a pretty good hike to break things up. It was just about perfect. ...

There are three main ways to drive between Aqaba and Amman. When we drove from Amman to Aqaba a few days ago, we took the center route (highway 35). Today, on our way back from Aqaba to Amman, we decided to take the western route (highway 65) along the shores of the Dead Sea. I think the eastern route (highway 15) may actually be the “fastest” way, but it didn’t look very interesting, so we never took it. ...

We flew on Egypt Air from Cairo to Amman this morning. The flight is just barely longer than an hour, but they still managed to do a full meal service. None of us were hungry, having already sat for a really good breakfast in the executive lounge at the Cairo Marriott earlier that morning. I can say without a doubt that the food options on our Egypt Air flights were definitely lower quality than all our other flights on the trip. ...

When you make plans to summit volcanos, your plans have to be flexible. Volcán de Pacaya just began a new intense eruption yesterday and a new period of increased activity, so the country closed the National Park. Nobody gets to go near the volcano until it slows down. We got the email about it today, so we won’t be climbing to the summit tomorrow night to watch the lava flow down the side of the mountain after all. We’re hoping it will calm down enough before we have to fly back to the United States in a couple weeks, but there’s no way to predict what it will do. Brett’s kids are pretty upset about missing it, but there’s nothing we can do except enjoy our other activities. We’re still expecting to have a great weekend in Semuc Champey this weekend, but even that depends on the weather. ...

We went to bed around 9 pm last night. We must be crazy gringo party animals. We invited Nate to sleep on the pull-out bed below our bunkbeds last night because he didn’t sleep very well on the couch in the family room the night before. There are no window coverings in there and the lights from outside were shining right on him. He fell asleep almost immediately, but he didn’t last very long. There was thumping music and fireworks keeping the rest of us awake until about midnight. And that’s about the time Nate decided he would rather sleep on the couch than in our room. I guess we are too noisy with our random coughs and snoring. I woke Charmaine up a few times to get her to stop snoring, but I think I slept pretty well overall. ...

Feeling Fine As expected, I felt fine this morning. I didn’t want to get too crazy, but I did eat some pan dulce and drank a little orange juice. We worked some magic and found a nice Airbnb on the beach in Monterrico, rented some cars from Alamo, and headed south for a beach adventure. It isn’t El Salvador, but it’s the next best thing. Our Airbnb hosts were hurrying to make our unit ready for us and said they could have it available by 2:00 pm if we returned the Excel spreadsheet with our passport numbers and license plates. The form had to be filled out by us, then signed by the owner of the unit and returned to the property management and security dudes prior to our arrival or we wouldn’t be allowed in the gate. Of course, we couldn’t fill out the form until we knew our license plate numbers and we wouldn’t know those until we picked up our rental cars. ...