Guatemala Day 5 August 14, 2018

Today we bid farewell to Guatemala. We didn’t have to leave the hotel until noon, so we were able to sleep in a bit later than our other days here.

Our plans were simple, go eat breakfast, walk to the grocery store for Guatemalan candy and snacks, and get a coffee at McCafe (I know I just said there is a time and place, but coffee is different especially when it’s an Instagramable moment), and pack our bags. Guess what? We did all of that and even bought a few last minute, over priced souvenirs at the hotel gift shop.

As mentioned previously, the tour company likes you get you to the airport 3 hours early for international flights, so we had plenty of time on our hands and a lot of leftover quetzales to spend. Much to our surprise, the souvenir prices at the airport were great! Some of the prices were lower than what we paid in Chichicastanenga. Our money went much farther than anticipated. All the shops had stuff for a dollar! That is unheard of at an airport. Needless to say, we bought several dollars worth. We were limited only by the remaining space in our carry on. I am pretty sure we were able to spend all of our quetzales except some coins and small bills which we were planning to keep for souvenirs.

In an interesting side note, we had planned to spend some of our remaining quetzales on postage stamps for our very short postcard list. Don’t feel bad if you aren’t on the postcard list, we don’t even send one to our mother. Anyways, we were super excited to buy these postcards at the hotel gift shop. The gift shop had told us we could buy stamps at the front desk, so we envisioned writing and sending postcards on day one before we even did anything. It was such a great plan! Except they don’t sell stamps at the front desk. They told us to buy them at the airport which we thought was odd, but we had no other choice than to go along with that. So this morning we asked the driver, and he had never heard of buying stamps at the airport. We asked the United Airlines employees at the check in counter, but they said you can only get stamps at a post office and were trying to tell us where to by postcards. However, I am not sure what post office they were referring to because the lady at the airport information booth told us that Guatemala doesn’t have a postal system. She said that a Canadian company used to run the mail, but they had an argument or something and pulled out. So, I don’t know how Guatemalans get their Kohl’s coupons if they don’t have a postal service? Anyways, sure enough, downstairs next to the gift shops was an empty and abandoned store front that was once a post office. So our perfect plan of punctual postcards was positively ruined by the Canadians.

And on that note, our brief vacation to Guatemala comes to an end. Thank you to our faithful readers for accompanying us on our exciting journey to our 61st country! We have discovered that we quite enjoy trips within an hour of our time zone. It sure does help with jetlag, so I see more Central and South American countries in our future. We bid you farewell until we begin our Antarctica Adventure in November. We love you all!

Love,

thetwinsontour

The closed post office at the airport