Wandering Around the World: January 2005

City tour of Quito with the whole group

We spent the morning touring the city of Quito, the various churches, statues, and cathedrals.
The rest of the group arrived last night, so there are now seven of us.
Dennis, Bruce, Brian, Peggy, Rick, and Joel (me).
Tonight we have a gear check to make sure we have the proper items for the climbs, then a nice group dinner and we will be off tomorrow morning for our first hike.
We are all anxious to get going but we never tire of sitting in a sidewalk cafe drinking the local brews.
The weather cleared up today and it was warm and sunny. Check out www.ecuadorexpedition.blogspot.com for some new photos.

Additional photographs

Dennis is uploading photos to his blog, checkout:
http://ecuadorexpedition.blogspot.com/

Here is a painting we saw while wandering around the local craft fair. There were thousands of paintings and other artwork for sale. We are off for a tour of Quito today.

Afternoon Update

Jose Louis stopped by at 11 and picked us up and we walked around the town and went to a nice place for lunch. Great blackberry smoothies (actually they were raspberry) and a club sandwich.

We walked to the local park where on Saturdays and Sundays they have an outdoor market with local crafts and paintings. There were at least 1000 paintings on sale, some really nice ones... some crappy.
I worked on my haggling a bit and bought a small original oil painting for $10.

On the way back to the hotel we stopped by a Casino (mostly to try to get smaller bills) and we decided to try out the nickel slot machines. I won $60 on my first pull and then we left. Not bad... the people working there were a bit excited, but I had no idea how I won the $60 since it was all in Spanish and you hand to push little squares on the video screen, somehow I won 5 cents but then pushing these squares I got it up to a 1600X multiplier so I ended up get 1600 nickels. I gotta say... that is a one shit-load of nickels.

Quito!

¡Ola para Quito!
We all arrived safe and sound last night in Quito, Ecuador. Well all of us except Bruce´s luggage! It seems that American Airlines decided to hang onto his climbing gear for another day.

Speaking of American Airlines, man does it suck. Airlines must really be struggling since they no longer give you pillows, and (Evan you will be amazed by this) they charge you $5 for a beer even on International Flights! What the hell!

Jose Louis picked us up at the airport last night and drove us to the hotel where Bruce and I drank several beers waiting for Mike and Dennis to show up. There was a bit of a language problem so each round of beers (cervezas) cost a different amount.

Its cloudy here and the rest of the group shows up tonight, I hear we had a cancellation so the group is shrinking to 7 and we don´t know exactly who cancelled.

Jose Louis is picking us up in about an hour and we are going to go find a great place for lunch.
We are trying to find a inernet cafe with USB so we can try to upload some photos so stay tuned...

Ecuador Trip Starts Tomorrow!

I will be heading out to Ecuador tomorrow morning (2/29) at 6am.
I'll hopefully post a photo or two plus some text on Monday (if I find a good internet cafe).