Wednesday was our last day in Mindo. It was a delightful little jungle escape, but the limited bus schedule didn’t inspire a lot of dawdling. But now we had dialed in our breakfast(s) routine. First stop was the neighborhood panederia to grab some fresh rolls for first breakfast and fuel our walk to the tourist cafe for coffee and juice. Then off to that week’s grandma’s house for some steaming hot humitas. It was the kind of morning that could almost make you forget that you had to step over a literal river of fire ants to get to your hostel room the night before. Almost.
Then it was off to the bus stop. The actual stop, not just some random intersection in the middle of town where we semi-accidentally hopped off at the day we arrived. We were seasoned pros at this point. There were already a handful of people waiting around, so we knew we were in the right place. It was a profoundly stereotypical South American bus stop. A single fan in the corner completely outmatched by the already-oppressive 8 am heat? Check. Four unshowered 20-somethings that we overlapped with at the colibri house? Check. A ticket agent who “forgot” to give me back one of our passports after we paid? Check. An Australian talking about his journey up from Argentina? Check. A few unplaceable Central European accents wafting through the room? Check. An older local couple with suitcases full of produce? Check. I couldn’t have invented a more quintessential scene if I tried. I said we were doing the bus trip for our kids, but that’s only a small part of it. I love this stuff.
We learned our lesson from the departure trip and took the kids to the bathroom with entire minutes to spare before the bus left. So we had a much less frenzied time getting settled this time around. The kids took positions to maximize their sightseeing while Aimee and I tucked our valuables underneath us in preparation for our eventual naps.
The bus trip back was painless. We listened to the hostel crowd swap stories about their previous stops with an air of oneupmanship. It took everything I had not to point out to them that the real challenge wasn’t backpacking across South America, it was doing everything they mentioned with an 8 year old that is physically incapable of not petting every street dog she comes across, and a 5 year old that rates statues by how fun they are to jump off. That’s real adventure travel.
We didn’t even have a layover—the only real challenge of the trip out to Mindo—since Quito was our final destination for that day. We were spending the night at Alicia and Isaias’ place to sneak in some more time with them and get an early jump on our flight the next morning (not home, more on that in a minute).
The afternoon was delightful. All four kids played out on the porch while the rest of us caught up on our trip to Mindo and Alicia’s upcoming next embassy selection. Even though she had been at the Quito embassy for less than a year, the Foreign Service assignments are planned out far enough in advance that it was already time for her to rank her preferences. We obviously voted heavily in favor of places we’d like to visit her at, but there was far more for her to consider. A cool site might not have any nearby schools. A place with great schools might have less interesting work. Did she want to work for a career ambassador with more experience or an appointed ambassador with close connections to the president? So much more to think about than what the food situation is.
So we enjoyed living vicariously through her and ranking in our own minds the virtues of Bogota, Mexico City, Buenos Aires and a handful of other Latin American capitols. We didn’t envy how agonizing that decision would be. And at the end of the day, it was only a preference ranking. There would still be a very real chance that she’d be assigned to Nuevo Laredo on the border with Texas because the person doing Alicia’s job there right now learns about a sick family member back home and puts in her notice the morning Alicia’s name comes up for assignment. It’s a very tenuous process and a frequent stress point for many Foreign Service officers.
But thoughts of their future home quickly melted away into memories of their previous home when one of Alicia’s friends from the embassy dropped by. He had overlapped with Aimee and Alicia in Nicaragua when the three of them were in the Peace Corps, and their stories from then were further encouraged by Isaias cooking up an incredible dinner of Nicaraguan classics. It was beyond delicious.
We had barely been in Ecuador for a few weeks, but something about a fantastic meal with good friends made Quito really start to feel like home. But we didn’t have time to get sentimental. At the crack of dawn the next morning, we’d be setting off for the Galápagos Islands. Yep. The time had come. The land of tortoises, blue footed boobies, and that bizarre murder documentary Alicia showed us the first night we arrived. Pretty exciting stuff.
Buenas noches.
