Odds and Ends

It's pretty calm here now that the house has closed, but we still had and have some odds and ends to clear up.  A big one was to travel to Guayaquil for the night and do a few things...renew Tali's and Finn's passports (theirs were set to expire in October of next year and most countries will not allow you in unless you have a six month gap before expiration), get new pages added to Mark's and mine, and get a replacement cedula, which is our national ID card.  I had lost mine.

All went very smoothly.  On Wednesday we tackled my cedula with our facilitator, Dana.  I had to obtain a migratorio movimiento, which is a paper that tracks your exits and entries into the country, a colored copy of my passport page and the same of my visa page, and my passport.  After a short wait all of my documents were submitted and ok'd.  My cedula will be ready this Tuesday.  Very nice.

We finished around 3:00pm and tried to find a pool for the kids as our hotel did not have one.  I had tried to book a hotel with a pool, but there were no hotels available in Guayaquil that night.  It was crazy!

We had been told that the Hilton allowed you to use theirs for a fee as well as the Grand, our favorite hotel.  We first went to the Hilton as it was closer.  OMG, the woman at the counter was so snooty.  It really busted my chops.  She told me in a very quiet voice that "the pool is only for the hotel guests."  Whatever!  Lol

Same thing at the Grand, but they wanted to charge us $30 per person.  We were so pissed.  What a bunch of a&$holes.  We've stayed at the Grand several times and we love it.  However, one time Finn cut his foot pretty severely on a large chunk of glass in the pool.  Medics were called, etc...Did we make a big fuss?  Nooooo.

I wish I would have tried to talk to the guy more, but when people treat us like that I just shut down and walk away.

So, we glumly went back to our hotel all sweaty with no fun pool time in sight.  Next time.

Thursday we got up early in order to make sure that we were at the U.S. Consulate on time for our appointment at 8:45.  There was a long line of Ecuadorians, but we were ushered to a shorter line for U.S. citizens.  After three bag searches and two scannings and wandings each, we were finally allowed in.  We waited about five minutes and were called up to the window.  After about fifteen minutes we had our paperwork processed, and about another fifteen minutes later Mark and I had our new passport books with extra pages in hand.  Tali's and Finn's books will be ready in ten days to two weeks.  Much faster than the U.S.'s four to six weeks!  We were very happy with the process and everyone at the Consulate was very nice and accommodating.

We drove to and from Guayaquil, but while in the city we used taxis.  It is too hard to drive there and Mark hates it.  I don't blame him.  It's crazy.

We had the best taxi drivers!  Our most memorable driver was Juan Paul.  He was a young guy and he loved older "American" music.  He played for us all of his favorites...Billy Joel, George Michael, The Beatles, Lionel Ritchie...He loved the melancholy songs that reminded him of his girlfriend who broke his heart.  I almost thought he was going to start crying as he sang to the songs and reminisced about the good times they had together.  It was too funny.

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We are leaving two weeks from tomorrow.  Yikes!  I went through all of our clothes today and purged a ton.  We have two huge bags of clothes to give to our friend, Rocio, and her school, CETAP Lucy.

We have decided to go to Italy in November.  We haven't heard from our friend, Robert, who had offered his villa to us, but we are going to go anyway.  I hope he is okay.  After that will be Israel with side trips to Jordan,  China and maybe Turkey and Egypt.

With the refugee situation coming to a head we are rethinking the rest.  I had a pretty extensive, but flexible, itinerary worked out, but I think now we will wait to see how the situation unfolds and plan accordingly.  We are hoping by March, when we were supposed to head into Bulgaria, that things will have settled down, but time will tell.  As of today, Germany has closed it's border with Austria, and there is a rumor that they may be shutting down the Schengen Zone.  It's going to be an interesting trip, but as I told Finn today...if we get tired of it, we will just come home.  No worries.

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Here are some photos of our Ecuadorian penthouse.  It was nice and the kids had a great time playing on the terrace, but we were on the fourth floor and the traffic going by shook the entire building all night.  I thought we were having a constant string of earthquakes!

Leavin' on a Jet Plane

We bought our tickets for the U.S. today.  I spent all day working out the flights.  We wanted to fly into New York from Guayaquil or Quito and then take a bus to Cleveland because the savings are huge!  So, after a lot of back and forth I finally found an itinerary that would work.

We are flying to Quito the night of the 28th and then hanging around the airport all night.  The flight to New York leaves at 7:00am and we will arrive in New York City at 5:00pm.  I booked a great little apartment through airbnb in Brooklyn for two nights for only $105 a night. (Still waiting on confirmation of this.). There was no way we could survive these two flights and then hop on a bus for a ten hour ride.  So, we opted to stay in New York and show the kids the city.  I have to admit I am kind of excited about this part.

We leave on the bus to Cleveland at 10:00pm and will arrive at 7:00 in the morning.  Perfect.  Even with staying over two nights in New York and sight seeing for those two days, we saved $980 over flying directly from Guayaquil to Cleveland.  You can't beat that!