February 14, 2015 - What a nice way to spend Valentine's Day Today is our last day of not only this Galapagos voyage but of our South American adventure. Yes, we are a little sad, but yet, we are happy to return home. We started this trip thinking it might be our one and only visit to South America, but we have learned so much and fallen in love with the countries here and their immense diversity that, yes, we will return. Perhaps not to repeat the spots we v...

Galapagos Islands, Ecuador - February 11, 12 & 13, 2015 February 11 was what I will call an investment day. It's like sacrificing something good and worthwhile in order get a better pay back in return. Our investment was a whole vacation day spent on a plane. Our flight was scheduled for a 6:30 am departure but was delayed three hours due to weather . . . a little fog. We had a scheduled stop in Guayaquil but we suffered a delay there too. We had consum...

A free day at last - we can do exactly the things we want. No schedule at all . . . except that we have a 4:30 am pick-up on Wednesday morning for our flight to Baltra, Ecuador, an island of the Galapagos and our entrée to the others. This means we must make ourselves tired enough to fall asleep early to get a good night's sleep before a 3:30 am alarm. Before we get into anything else, I want to talk about food. Yes, like those in Peru, the people here love...

We seem to think that land to the north is "up" and land to the south is "down," i.e., up north and down south. Actually the earth's rotation is more like an axis running through the North pole to the South Pole in a horizontal position, with the northern hemisphere rotating clockwise and the southern hemisphere rotating in a counter-clockwise fashion!! We visited 0o0'0" latitude which marks the exact center circle of the earth, the Equator. We saw demons...

The city of Quito, the second Inca capital, is built on a plateau and is surrounded by mountains. At this time, it is rainy season and it rains in Quito, surely, almost every day. A few miles away, however, there is no rain. The city of Quito seems to be very beautiful, very beautiful! According to our guide, our hotel was the first hotel built in Quito in the 1960's. Thankfully it has been well-kept and regularly renovated. It is a classic 60s beauty. It ...