SKORTS, SHORTS, AND BUS BATHROOMS

Today we spent 10 hours on a bus riding from Antigua to Flores. There are flights to Flores, but they cost thrice as much and just reinforce the idea that we have to move speedily all the time.
Some of my most pleasurable travel moments are when I'm in transit, just poking along aiming for Somewhere. And the BEST moments are when I don't know where Somewhere is. I love to take long, rambling walks and just see what I see, hear what I hear, smell what's there. I have a good sense of direction, so I rarely feel truly lost, but that almost-lost feeling is so fun! (Stephen can't do this. He is lost most of the time, even in his home town. Literally, not figuratively. On more important levels, he's nicely grounded.)

Okay, the whole day wasn't wonderful. Trying to use the bathroom in a rolling, pitching bus was an experience I don't need to repeat to feel fulfilled. Then there was the guy that got on the bus halfway through the journey and sat across from me sending strong wafts of bad B.O. my way for 150 kilometers. And he jabbered nonstop at the young gal next to him, so I kept my eye on them, to see if I needed to "rescue" her from the could-be-a-creep. But that ended well enough when he got off the bus in a cute little village that was having a parade in the middle of the street that the bus was negotiating. Through the window, as we made our way slowly down the street against the flow of the parade, I shot photos of Guatemalan cowboys on horses and young girls wearing plastic silver crowns waving at the crowd. But I'm using a hotel computer tonight, so I can't upload the photos for you.

Mothers and (presumably) sons would board the bus every so often with baskets of food and drink. We bought fried chicken (a Guatemalan staple) and "tortillas de carne" (YUM!) and rice and tortillas. We paid $5 for three meals. We drank the juice boxes we'd brought and munched on our chocolate. Gloria lay in my lap and looked up at the clouds, imagining. Grace read "Dracula" and slept. Stephen napped and jotted down some notes for work. I watched the landscape change from dry hills with cactus, to burnt sugar cane fields, to green hills that reminded me of home, to palm trees and more green -- and always the craggy, volcanic mountains.

Now here we are in a motel in Flores, a pastel-hued town on a small island in the middle of a lovely lake in Peten, the largest and most northern of the 22 Guatemalan departments (states.)
It's a jungle out there, or so I'm told. We have tickets for Monday morning to visit Tikal, an important and famous Classical Mayan site. It's set in the middle of the huge Mayan Bioreserve, a largely unexplored jungle, full of many other Mayan sites, most of them not yet excavated, and many not yet even discovered. This is an area rich with mystery and possibility.

I get to wear my shorts and tee-shirt to church tomorrow. We only brought our backpacks, since we are staying only 3 nights. When we checked online for the location of the church here in Flores, we didn't find any, so I took my skirt out of my backpack and left it with our luggage. But it turns out (coincidentally?) that the shuttle driver here in Flores is Mormon (I asked him about the church) so we now know when and where to show up tomorrow morning. The girls have skorts and Grace is rather appalled at my proposed dress, but of course, Jesus doesn't care, and that's good enough for me.