Nothing adVentured, Nothing Gained Part 2

In Part 1 of this story, I shared the crazy way in which we arrived in San Pedro La Laguna.  If you haven’t yet read that tale, read it here before going on.  And then I hope you enjoy the most redemptive parts of the tale here in Part 2.

Our first night’s sleep in Guatemala was punctuated with barking dogs and eventually roosters crowing.  Atticus and I slept well in our bed though Shelly and Baxter shared a rough night in theirs.  Daylight was welcome.

We climbed the stairs from the second floor where our beds are located to the third floor where the kitchen is.  To everyone’s delight, our hostess Mayda had prepared pancakes for our welcome breakfast.  We all ate well and then stepped through the kitchen door out onto the roof-top patio for this view.

Soon after breakfast, Mayda walked us through snaking alleyways and corridors to drop us off at our Spanish school.  We discovered the source of the lodging misunderstanding and chalked it up to a matter of idioms lost in email translation.  We briefly used the WiFi at the school to let our parents know we’d arrived safely (sparing the details of Part 1) and then set out to find the Hotel Sakcari where we were supposed to have spent the previous night and the subsequent six.

Shelly and I decided we would continue our stay with the host family and would cancel our hotel reservation.  We had to forfeit the $50 deposit, but in exchange the proprietor showed us to the room that would have been ours and said we had a few hours to use the grounds before check out time.  And use them we did!

Hammock on the hotel lawn.

Paddling Lake Atitlan beneath San Pedro volcano using hotel's kayak.

Sure beats the ice storm back home!

Bliss!

We capped off our brief stay with hot showers before returning to our new home-away-from-home for a late lunch.  And then we took the one-minute walk through the market to the local basketball court in the center of town.  Baxter and Atticus got pretty excited about our proximity to this place where kids of all ages play basketball and soccer throughout the day.  In Guatemala, students go to school either in the morning or in the afternoon always leaving many kids free. 

2 on 2 basketball with local kids.

What a turnaround from our confused arrival in the darkness the night prior!  It would have been easy for any one of us to get very down on our initial experience.  I’m especially impressed by how resilient Baxter and Atticus have been.  Good food, kind people, beautiful views, kayaking, swimming, basketball with local kids, and heaps of sunshine warming the air—we think we can work with these building blocks to have an exceptional time while in San Pedro studying Spanish.  But it took quite a journey to get here.  Perhaps it’s true: nothing adventured, nothing gained.