First Day Pics

We arrived late Friday evening, but wasted no time on Saturday, getting into Quito's "New Town". This is north of the "Old Town", where the Spaniards initially constructed their city after the conquest of the Incas. A portion of New Town is very touristy, prompting locals to derisively call it, "Gringolandia".

The Andes Mountains are in view everywhere in Quito. Coming from a flat place like Indiana, even common views are exhilerating!

Update: I figured out the trick with Blogger and the upload speeds. For whatever reason, the pictures have to be uploaded before the text is added, and two pictures is all it will allow. Don't ask me to explain, but at least I can finally get pictures here!

Welcome!

Ame has wanted to do a Spanish immersion abroad for some time, to augment her language skills with her work as a midwife, where many of her mommas speak Spanish exclusively. While I am pretty open-minded about travel, I had two criteria: no overwhelming humidity, and no mosquitos. That ruled out Costa Rica, which was the first choice. Actually, it ruled out many locations and pointed us to Ecuador.

Quito is situated in the Andean highlands, between two ranges of the Andes Mountains. The altitude is a great factor in negating the humidity. When we started researching and discovered that the Galapagos Islands are a part of Ecuador, and that Quito is the springboard for travel to Quito, our minds were made up pretty quickly.

So, the purpose of this blog is to share pictures and observations from our travels.

Depending on our access to internet (and speeds), I may be posting all of the pictures to our page on www.myphotoalbum.com. In any case, I will be online almost daily, and will try to post frequently.