We just had our last weekend at our house in Ermita Santa Lucia, our home in Guatemala. Today we are heading up to Guatemala City to spend the night, and then depart for a 5 week trip to Australia and New Zealand. I'ts a pretty reasonable question to ask why we are leaving the country during our "year in Guatemala," and the answer, is "Ummm, wellll...." Actually, it makes a lot of sense to me that, since this is the only time our kids will ever have a big school break during the fall season, we take the opportunity to go [View Full Entry]

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This story is accompanied by only one picture so the rest of it you’ll have to make up on your own. I like a good massage once in a while, and decided it was time to check out the local digs and see what was available. Now Antigua has some fairly shi-shi operations so I was certain I could find a five star set-up in town but I wanted a more “local” experience so I decided to go to Fraternidad-Naturista, a place where the middle class here can get a good 45 minute rub down for about $12 US. First I [View Full Entry]

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As we are nearing our big vacation to Australia/New Zealand, we wanted to take one last road trip before we leave. (In case this is the first time you've heard about this, we decided that, given the kids' "summer break" which lasts until January, we wanted to take a major vacation Down Under since neither we nor our kids will likely have so much free time available during the good travel season). Anyhoo, we have been in Guatemala over 2 months and had yet to see one of the major travel destinations in this country: Lago de Atitlán, or Lake Atitlán. [View Full Entry]

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Being Westcoasters all, we are not accustomed to being too far from the Pacific Ocean, so this weekend we decided to take a little day trip down to the coastal down of Monterrico. This is considered one of the more touristy spots in the country; lots of Guatemalans (from the City) have vacation houses here, but you'll also see a ton of young kids living the beach life down here, which evidently means hanging around in a beach hammock. On Saturday morning we rented a car from the wonderful Hugo Suarez, a little Toyota RAV4 which we crammed our tall selves [View Full Entry]

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Today we went up a mountain and jumped of a cliff with a rope. The day started with a 1 hour drive to a mountain that is famous for being used for human sacrifice by the Mayans a long time ago. When we got to the mountain the first thing we did is climb up a mountain in some pretty dense jungle. It is full of really cool bugs. For example we saw a butterfly with a 5 inch wing span as well as a few stick bugs and a really cool yellow ant that was about 1 inch long. Even [View Full Entry]

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Just a quick story about the Big Freakin' Spiders we saw this week. One evening last week Lucas came running into our family room, soaking wet with a towel around his waist. "There's a big spider in my shower! I'm not going back in there!" Steve and I took a look, and sure enough, crouched on the curtain rod was this SIGNIFICANTLY large spider. Sort of yellow-ish, orangey. Long, arched legs - the worst kind. My immediate thoughts were KILL, KILL, KILL the bad spider, but Steve's motto is "Spiders are our friends." (With friends like these...) He tried to "shoo" [View Full Entry]

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(Steve's entry) When our friends invited us to visit “Guatemala’s Disneyland” we thought it was a euphemism but we were surprised and delighted to find that they weren’t kidding. IRTRA is a pair of theme parks not far from the northern Pacific coast of Guatemala. It is a fairly new operation that was the brainchild of a man who is currently running for vice-president of the country. His idea was to collect 1% of the salary of employees of all private companies. He wanted to invest in a series of destination facilities that would then be affordable to the average [View Full Entry]

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For the past few weeks we noticed more and more flags popping up in various locations: the Parque Central, local shops, the municipal buildings, on cars, and even vendors walking around selling flags. (You can see a little picture of the flag on this entry at the bottom; I think it's quite lovely and you can see the little "15 de Septiembre, 1821" pictured on it). At first I thought it was due to the elections - obviously an important day for any local citizen. It turns out, however, that the 15th of September is Guatemalan Independence Day. On that day [View Full Entry]

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(Written by Steve) September 9 was election day in Guatemala. For the several months preceding the elections, the country buzzed with demonstrations, trucks carrying loud speakers, banners and some violence between candidates and parties (although nothing in Antigua itself). On election day itself, everything seemed very, very orderly. People line up with their ID at the assigned table, are checked and handed separate (certified) ballots for presidential, congressional and local candidates and after they’ve voted, they turn in their ballot and mark their hand with ink to show t [View Full Entry]

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We've been getting a lot of emails today from friends worrying about us with regards to the Hurricane(s) coming into Guatemala. Luckily, we don't expect anything other than more rain. Antigua is at 5,000 feet in elevation and about an hour's drive from the Pacific Coast, so we won't get any real affect from the hurricane(s) except a bunch of RAIN and more RAIN. I remember a friend Shaun Hughes saying he really wouldn't care to travel to Central America during the rainy season, and while our week's visit here last year was incredibily beautiful, I can see how any visitor [View Full Entry]

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