Following our unexpected morning, we left Villa Maya at 1 PM for the ten-hour trip to Antigua. We got word that the barricade had been taken down and after about an hour we began meeting the long string of cars and trucks that had been delayed in the opposite direction. We were very grateful not to have spent the morning sitting in the sun along the road.
When we stopped at a Texaco station for what Guillermo called “a wee-wee break,” he said he hoped there would be toilet seats in all the stalls. Caravan provided toilet seats a couple months ago, but some disappeared. I thought it was cool that Caravan would invest in the places they frequent to make them more desirable, not just for their own clients, but for others as well.
While we waited for everyone to be ready, we watched some cowboys wrangling a cow in this truck. She wanted to lie down, but if she did, she would soon be trampled by the other cattle as they shifted in the confined space. Guillermo pointed out that the cattle had probably had five or six extra hours in the back of the truck waiting at the barricade.
The dinner that had been planned for our hotel in Antigua was rescheduled for the restaurant where we stopped for a break on the way north—the peacock place. It was served quickly. The taste was fine, but they obviously had had it ready for us for a while.
We arrived at Hotel Porta Antigua a little after 11 as expected—probably the most beautiful hotel I have ever stayed in, but then I have been enamoured with courtyard houses since high school Latin class.
Our room has a fourteen-foot ceiling and a fireplace.
I took this of the reception area the morning after we arrived.
A corridor goes under the street to another part of the hotel where the resturant is.
That courtyard is lovely at night.
But the pool is pretty ordinary compared to ours. Too bad it is too chilly to want to get wet.
Still, the other part of the hotel is pretty nice in the evening at dinner time.
We met at 9 AM for a walking tour of the town. That merits not one, but two, blog entries.
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