Ecuador (Part 2)

So if you haven't read the previous post, read part 1.  It will help you know how we were feeling arriving in Ecuador.

Ok, at this point we're at the hotel.  Hungry.  The guy checks us in and asks if we're ready to eat.  We say yes of course.  He says, can you wait 20 minutes?  Ok.  I mean what choice do we have?  We're literally in the middle of nowhere and we had already bought the "meal plan" with the hotel since we knew they had a restaurant.  We can be patient.  Let's get a little settled.  Maybe we should move Leah's mattress to the floor so when she rolls off it won't be as painful.  :)  We can do that.

The view from our bed

The view from the other side of the room, from the kids' beds

So we head to the restaurant.  We go in the kitchen.  Not the right door.  Well, it's dark and we have no idea where we're going.  Fast forward.  Let's just get dinner.  Filet minion.  Yes, I'll have that since we've already paid for the food.  Now we just need to figure out what to get for the kids that won't cost an arm and a leg.  A necessary evil.  They do have to eat after all.

We're not going to go into detail about this, but all we'll say is the food was AMAZING.  We both ordered steak multiple times.  The chicken and pasta dishes were great also.  Breakfast was a plate of fresh fruit with amazing bread and eggs.  We felt soooo blessed by the food.  We also couldn't believe how decent the prices were.  The steaks were around $17.  As we savored the food for the 2ish days we were there, we couldn't help but think that it was perfect timing.  Sure we maybe were spending more on food than we would've liked, but we hadn't had food this good in about a year.  Manna from heaven.  We felt legitimately spoiled that we could be enjoying food that was so good.

The kids enjoyed the rocks that looked like
an upside down ice cream cone

Enough about the food.  This hotel is in the middle of the mountains.  They advertised that it's on the edge of a volcano.  We're not sure where the actual volcano was, but we didn't care.  We could literally look out either side of our hotel room to see mountains.  We looked out the window from our bed to see  gorgeous green mountains and blue skies.  From the view of the kids beds we could see the city of Quito down in the valley surrounded by mountains.  It was surreal.  Awesome.  Breathtaking.

Papa and Leah with a llama in the background

There was nothing to do there.  So we went for walks.  We explored.  We tried to pet the resident llamas but they would have none of it.  We tried.  Oh well.  We walked a couple of paths and explored a bit.  We played Uno and Go Fish.  The kids watched some Mickey Mouse and other random things we could find on the tv.  It was just really chill.  And we loved it.  No computer.  No ipad.  No phones.  No internet.  We didn't even know what time it was most of the time.  Totally unplugged.  It was so great.

Breakfast.  The views from the restaurant were just as great.

We really enjoyed our time there.  But like most great things, it started to get a little hard with the kids.  As many of you know, kids like toys and being entertained.  Well, this wasn't exactly the place for that.  Had it just been the 2 of us, we probably would've welcomed/enjoyed more time there.  But like many things with our kids, they lost interest pretty quickly.  So we arrived on Sunday around 8:00 pm and left on Wednesday around 2:30 in the morning.  It was plenty of time there.

Leah loved picking all of the flowers we saw

We're really glad we decided to go there.  Part of our thinking in choosing that place was because we weren't sure if we'd ever go to Ecuador, let alone that hotel.  So we decided to be a little adventurous and we're glad we were.  We'll post a third and final post about our visit.  There's a few fun details about our time there that we want to share....

Noah loving sitting on the "rock chair"