Dragging my family all over Ecuador

At 12:30am we waited for Grandma and Grandpa to arrive in Ecaudor! Noah was jumping out of his pants he was sooooo excited! It was very good to see familiar faces! When Mom got to me she gave me a huge hug and said ¨Rebekah told me to give you this card as soon as we say you¨ So I opened it up and it is just white card, and then with a marker it said ¨you are here...(then the picture of the world, with a spot in Ecuador) and sad faces all along the bottom).........and....I am here too!!!! I was so shocked! She had sent me an email saying that she got a promotion at work and she was going to be in Tronto training for 10 days...LIAR! She was coming to Ecuador! That was a very cool surprise. So because they had just travelled for roughly 18 hrs we headed to a brother and sisters house and stayed there.

         Did I have a trip in mind for them! I had to take them to my favorite town in Ecuador, Otavalo. It is in the North and it has a very famous market there. Most of the very talented Artisans live there and I feel like I  am in heaven there! 

     The next morning we were back on the plane. I really do not like the bus over the mountains, there has been so much rain in the past 2 months the roads are TERRIBLE at the best of times, I really don´t like them now! So we headed to Quito on the plane and stayed over night there for 1 night. Then we got on a bus for the 3 hour ride to Otavalo, the landscape was amazing! So we arrive in Otavalo and the first Hostel we found looked really nice, so the group sent Noah and I in to check out the room. It had this cute brick rounded window in the middle and 5 beds. It also had a really cool paint job, deep yellow and red, with this green stripe along the top, it is hard to decsribe, by apparently I was stuck blind by the job. I did feel the beds and they were a little stiff, but OK...so I thought! We were going to pay for 3 nights but was decided one just 1. Thank goodness! The beds were a concrete slab with a faux mattress cover over them. They are offically the hardest beds any of us has ever slept on! 2nd problem that was noticed right away was the fact that the toliet had no lid! (I swear I checked that) At 10:30 at night, we turned off all the lights and were  TRYING to get comfortable in our ¨beds¨ and Beks says ¨Wow, I sure do appreciate the cool paint job right now! The green stripe really adds........but we couldn´t hear the rest of her sentence because we were all laughing too hard!!

   The next morning Gordon was soooo sick, he had a fever all night and was sick as a dog. We found out a few days later that he had a throat infection. He never even went to the market. But we did, and had a ton of fun! Noah was so excited to take Grandma shopping in Spanish, he did all the bargaining and got her good deals! Beks and I shopped and then we put her zoom lense on her camera and I made her fake pose in front of all the old indiguious people so that I could get their picture with out having to ask. That was fun! So then we had to move to a new hostel. We moved to the same one that we stayed in with Tony and Sher. But this time on the top floor over looking Otavalo. It was pretty cool. When I was checking the toliet for a lid, I noticed the toliet was dirty. So, Mom gets this mop from the corner to clean the toliet, and I said ¨Mom don´t do that, you can´t clean a toliet with a mop!¨ Just then the lady came up with towels and I asked her to clean the toliet for us. ¨Si, si No problemo¨and she grabs the BROOM! and starts splashing water all over the toliet and scrubbing in down! Mom went and bought a scrub BRUSH and some bleach. 

    I really wanted to take Mom to Leather town. So the next morning at 7 just us 3 girls hopped on  a bus, rode 3 hours to Ambato, took a taxi to Quisapinca, shopped for 1.5 hours, took a taxi back and hopped on the bus for the 3 hour ride back to Quito, and then hopped on the plane to Guayaquil, and the next morning we took the 3 hour bus ride to Puerto Cayo. See what I mean about...dragging!!!!

I am sure Rebekah will have a better version of this expierence!!!

This is just week one, I will update more later.