Mitad de Mundo
During breakfast I watched a 1:30 video of hockey or something and the owner who apparently I annoyed interrupts me and says "Can I offer you a pair of headsets" while dangling them in front of my face.... It pretty much left me speechless because below the restaurant was a sawmill operation with really loud saws. Mom and I had a pretty good laugh over it while we talked loudly to each other to overpower the saws..... Anyway.....
We were off to the middle of the world! There was a direct bus from Mindo to Quito so we just asked to get dropped off in front of the Mitad de Mundo site.
So we're standing on the side of the highway with all of our luggage trying to decide if we should find a hotel or not. From what I could tell we had enough time to hopefully ditch our luggage, see the attractions and then catch another bus to Quito. So we bought tickets and I hauled the luggage up to a restaurant and thankfully they said we could leave our luggage there and it seemed pretty secure so I was happy! We walked around the site for an hour or two, got some pretty great pictures then we walked up the highway 200 m to another museum and the real equator line at 00*00'00"
We returned to the restaurant, got our luggage, had a bite to eat and changed into some warmer clothes. We got a public bus with all our luggage to one of the main terminals in Quito, it wasn't so bad at all! We decided it was probably not so wise to do anymore public transportation with all our luggage during rush hour so we just took a taxi all the way to our first hotel that we stayed in and left some of our luggage at before we left Quito.