Making Our Way to Ecuador

View of Quito from La Basillica

View of a portion of Quito, Ecuador from La Basiica.

Yesterday goes down in the books as one of my longest travel days yet and will likely hold that spot until I head home from this trip.  We left my friend’s place in Seattle at 6:00 am Friday morning and arrived at our hotel in Ecuador 18 1/2 hours later.  Almost half of that time was non-flying time.  Immigration in Ecuador ate up a whooping 1 1/2 hours!!!  The last thing I wanted to do after such a long day was stand in line with my backpack for that long.  The silver lining…once I’ve had such long day of traveling my expectations of my hotel are lower…meaning “just give me a bed”.  Turns out the Hotel Sierra Madre is actually quite nice (more about them later).

Back to “getting here”.  Every time I fly there has always been one person or event that just makes you say “hmmm”.  We’ll our “hmmm” was Roger.  I noticed the minute he sat down that he was “drunker than a skunk”.  Before I had time to tell my friend, she offered to trade seats with the gal next to me because we were originally seated separately.  If only she had known.  Roger proceeded to start a conversation with “Honey when they come by with drinks please wake me up”.  We thought he was talking to someone else until my friend asked “Are you talking to me?”  Once we determined he was she agreed to wake him for drinks.  Gee…he’d probably had enough already, but to my surprise he ordered a Sprite and once he had slept off the booze he was quite pleasant.  I think that was to be short lived since he was wondering outloud in the Immigration line if the bars would still be open this late.  But, drinking wasn’t Roger’s only “hmmm” moment.  There was the time he got up to go to the bathroom and his jeans pretty much fell off.  But the his crowning moment was when he showed us his princess themed lunch box.  Apparently he thought he had purchased Barbie, but he was straightened by some young girl who told him the name of all four princesses on the front.

Oh and by the way, after meeting the rest of our group today we found out that no one else even came close to our 1 1/2 hours in the Immigration line.  Most of them said it took about five minutes.  Seriously!

So today, we slept in until about 8:30 am and then headed out to see what we could find.  Luckily Hotel Sierra Madre is also fairly well located.  Coming soon…a post about our two walking tours of Ecuador.

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