La Visita de Nuestros Amigos, Carlos and Sarah

A few weeks ago, Carlos and Sarah visited us and spent time exploring Ecuador. Carlos arrived a few days before Sarah and hit the ground running. Roman and Carlos first traveled to Cotopaxi National Park where they enjoyed the beautiful views of the volcano and did some horseback riding. On Friday, they rode the teleferico in Quito and hiked to the top of the Pichincha volcano (over 15,000 feet) with Lucy.

After Sarah arrived, we all traveled to Otavalo for a night and went to the textile market. When we returned to Quito on Monday evening, we got to see a soccer match between rival teams Barcelona (Guayaquil) and Deportivo Quito at the stadium right by our apartment.

After a day spent touring around Old Town, Roman, Sarah, and Carlos headed off to Mindo for a few nights. They saw a lot of interesting bird species, went zip-lining through the rainforest canopy, and hiked to a few waterfalls. The trip went by so fast and we miss them already! There are so many more things that we saw and did while they were here but I will let the pictures tell the rest of the story.

Puerto Cayo

For Betsy’s spring break we drove to Puerto Cayo, about 450 KM southwest of Quito.  We were purposely seeking out a quiet place to just sit and do nothing and we found every bit of that there.

The home we rented was a brand new container home consisting of three converted shipping containers across the street from the beach.  We’ve never been in one before and it was pretty neat.

Our days were simple ones: we would get up, have some breakfast, and go out to the beach and set up for a day full of reading, sleeping, and getting in the water.  At the end of the day after watching the sunset we would drive into town for dinner and, on a few nights, watching soccer.

A highlight for me was definitely the lack of regulations. One day, when we drove to the main beach, things were so slow you were permitted to drive on to the beach and right up to the cabana you were renting.  Truly a novelty.

The sunset photos were taken over the entire week.  It was a great trip.