To the Beach

A few  weeks ago, the kids had several days off from school for Azogues Independence Day, so we drove a few hours down to the coast for the first time.  On the way, we spent the night and following day in Guayaquil, the largest city in Ecuador with 3 million people.  This is a port city, situated at the mouth of a huge river that drains the streams and rivers of half of the entire western portion of the country.   It is a lively city with salsa music filling the streets, great seafood, and a pleasant 2 mile long waterfront park.

The pigeons at this city park have formidable competition for food hand outs.

The next few days we spent along the central coastline.  We stayed at one beach that was as busy as Waikiki nearly all of the night, then spent a couple days on a 3 mile stretch of beach further north where we saw only a handful of other people all day long.  I had my first surfing lesson, getting up on the board and falling off shortly thereafter about a hundred times (so I was pretty sore the next day).  We ate seafood 2-3 times a day, played in the sand, ran on the beach.  When we returned back home in the mountains, we felt like we had been in a different country for the past week.

Hanging out in the hotel lobby.