After being home for 9.5 months, we were all so excited to travel again! We arrived in Guatemala City and were picked up by a driver who transferred us to Antigua. Antigua is super cool. It’s surrounded by volcanoes and is known for its Spanish colonial buildings. It is so pretty! We did a fair amount of walking around the cobblestone city and enjoyed looking at the different buildings. We visited the Santa Catalina Arch, which was very pretty, and pretty busy with cars and motorcycles. We also had a lot of great food in Antigua! The food there never really failed us. Our first morning we took an Uber up to a breakfast place which was on a huge hill. It was a buffet, and of course I got probably at least double what I should’ve gotten (who doesn’t?). It was very tasty. Our first night we had Indian-ish food which was tikka masala, madras, and chicken curry, but it wasn’t really classic Indian food. We all loved it. In the following days we had Guatemalan food, which included steak, vegetables, burritos, beans, various sauces, etc. and a traditional Guatemalan breakfast which was a rice dish (kind of like rice pudding), fruit, eggs, toast with banana and jam, cheese, and beans. And our last night in Antigua we had ramen!
One day we had a bike tour which took us outside of Antigua into neighboring villages. We rode about 1o miles that day and saw a few churches, toured a chocolate factory, and learned about Guatemalan culture from our guide, Henry. One other really cool thing that we saw on our bike tour was how Guatemalan women do laundry. It’s hard to explain, but I’ll do my best: there is a big pool under-a-roof-but-still-outside area that is called a pila and has different little closed off areas from the main pool where they wash their clothing with soap… and then they rinse it in a different closed off area. It was very interesting and looked like a social time — Henry said it gets very busy on the weekends!
The Guatemalan people were really nice and we made a lot of friends. I love Guatemala!
Some pictures around Antigua:
On our walk down from breakfast our first morning:
It is wonderful to see you all traveling again! The boys all look so grown up! We wish you joyous adventures and safe travels! Thank you so much for sharing these great photos! Love learning about the cultures!
Thank you for writing about your time in Antigua! Who wrote this post? So fun reading the different perspectives of the Hartshorn family!!! The pictured are great!!!
So great to see these awesome pictures and commentary again! But Michael, you appear to be shrinking…or the boys are catching up to/surpassing you in height 🙂
Oh yay Hartshorn family! It looks and sounds like yet another amazing country to visit! Thank you for sharing!!
Loved seeing pictures of your family traveling again! The pictures of you all riding bikes remind me of riding bikes in Hoi An in the rice fields. Hope you are all well!