Houston and San Antonio

So we've decided to head back to Central America and finish what we started. We might travel a bit more quickly than usual, in our hopes to prevent further lethargy.

In the meantime, my family have very kindly given us places to stay and recover our energy. From our hostel in Guatemala, it took us exactly 48 hours of buses and taxis to get to my little brother's apartment in San Antonio, TX. After almost catching up on sleep, he took us to Houston to surprise my parents. We were there for nearly two weeks, and it was great to see their new house in progress. It was also a great opportunity to catch up with my aunts, Nadine, Jon, Aspen, Cody, Laurie, and the cool team at my dad's office. Plus we got to attend an Astros game, which was great fun. (Thanks again, Dad!) We were hoping to head up to Seattle to see Bart, Lauren, and little baby Kirsten (before little baby Kirsten becomes walking talking toddler Kirsten!), but the logistics of it just don't work out right now.

So yesterday we got good ol' Greyhound back to San Antonio. Check this out...it left 20 minutes late but arrived 4 minutes early! Course, they also sold 69 tickets for only 47 seats. We just had to pay a little extra for priority seating (ie actually having the seats we'd already bought tickets for), the con artists!!!

After 3 months in Latin America, we've appreciated some things we didn't really think about before. Drinking water from the tap is a luxury. Finding clean bathrooms (with toilet paper, no less!) in every public place is delightful. Not having to translate everything we hear, read, and want to say is soothing, to be honest. Yet I already miss expanding my Spanish vocabulary and the invaluable practice of being immersed in another language. I miss a lot about Latin America, despite its lack of certain things I'm used to (which I was growing used to lacking before we came back to the US); the differences among cultures is what we want to experience and learn about. So it was interesting to note things here we'd gotten used to living without. I look forward to getting used to life down south once again.

For now, we're back in SA at Ross's new apartment, and this time, we have a longer stay: 3 nights here. Then we're heading back down to Antigua, Guatemala with possible stops in Mexico City and San Cristobal de las Casas. We shall see what happens with the US border patrol on our way out...