Saturday, December 31, 2011

Ecuador!

On the afternoon of the 28th we started our next set of travels by saying goodbye to Hank and then Sam, James, and his family before my parents drove us down to Madison. In Madison we caught the Van Galder bus down to O'hare and arrived at the airport around 9pm to wait for our flight, which wasn't scheduled to leave until 8 the next morning. So after a lot of waiting, people watching, and getting pretty much no sleep we were allowed to finally check our bags and enter the terminal to eat breakfast and drink coffee. We then caught our plane to Miami and had to hustle to our next plane for Quito but everything worked out beautifully and we landed right on time in Quito, made it through customs with no issues (even with the beard) to meet Jaxon and Caye at the arrivals gate.

They drove us to Caye's mother's house for the night and there we ate fruit, drank wine, and talked about all kinds of different things before retiring for the night. In the morning we awoke early, packed the car, and started our road trip to Caye's dad's house at the Hacienda Zuleta about two hours north of Quito. Before leaving Quito we stopped at a local store to buy fruit and snacks and then a bakery to buy sweets and bread.
The drive was beautiful and much less scary then how I've had South American driving described to me before, although there were definitely lower level of "safe" decisions made by other drivers. Along the way we were able to get some pan de yucca (yucca bread - delicious) with yogurt and a bunch more fruit which we had never tried before, all of them were delicious.