McBerkoBlog

We started our morning by packing up and walking over to breakfast at Kava's Pancake House, where Zadie again was excited to see that she could get bacon with her kid's breakfast meal. (Not a vegetarian, that one.) Next, we visited the Alaska Native Heritage Center . This place was very cool and informative, with a stage in the center, a movie theater, a lake surrounded by replicas of native homes, and a "hall of cultures" with artists, vendors, and artifacts. We arrived right as a dance performance had started, with singing, drums, and about 7 dancers, mostly young women. While everyone else watched that full performance (which Zadie tired of after a few songs), Zadie and I watched a movie about how kayaks and canoes were made by hand (wow). We then all toured the villages outside to walk through the six replica homes showing how various native people lived in the different environments and cultures of Alaska. Before we left, we watched a final movie together called ...

Next up, we headed to Alaska! This trip was a lifelong dream of Bill's dad, Jim, and we were excited to experience Alaska with him and Bill's sister, Mary. Major props to Mary for organizing so much of this trip! 👏👏👏 Our travel day happened to fall on Zadie's 6th birthday! We'd celebrated with family over the weekend so she wasn't feeling super "birthday girl" this day. Or maybe she was just tired - my cheap flights had us waking up at 2:45 a.m. for an early departure. We ended up scrambling when several ride share attempts fell through, eventually driving ourselves to the airport. Apparently not many drivers on the road that early (/late?) on a Monday morning! We landed in Dallas just after 7:00 a.m. and then had about 9 hours to kill before our next flight. Bill and the girls had never been to Texas, so we spent the day in downtown Dallas. The DART train took us directly from the airport to downtown Dallas, very convenient. We had lots o' coffee a...

Now that we've been home from Guatemala for several weeks, we sat down over sushi and discussed what we missed (food, culture, environment) vs. what we weren't as sad to leave behind (some convenience and health factors). Things We Miss Food! We ate so much great food on our trip. The prices were low enough that we could eat out frequently, and there were so many options that we didn't even visit all the restaurants we hoped to. For such a small town, there was a wide variety of international cuisine, and we mixed those with plenty of traditional Guatemalan options. We enjoyed a lot of Guatemalan coffee too, and I know Ruth will miss the frequent stops for flavored iced coffee. Our favorites were mostly simple things - super ripe fruit (mango!), being able to buy fresh cut fruit as a snack in the park, the handmade hot tortillas with "squeezy beans", and our near-daily avocado toast with always perfectly ripe avocado. The girls loved that cheap smoothies were offe...

We spent the first weekend in July on "a vacation from our vacation," swapping our normal Antigua routines for a visit to Lake Atitlan. The lake is the deepest lake in Central America, a huge volcanic crater. The majority of the population here is Maya and many different Maya languages are spoken, with Spanish as their second language. Saturday Our shuttle picked us up around 9 a.m. for our ~2.5-3 hr drive to Panachel, a larger town (~15K ppl) on one end of the lake. Pana was the first place where we saw older Guatemalan men in traditional clothing. (In Antigua, many women wear the beautiful traditional clothes but we never saw any men.)  We ate lunch at a traditional Guatemalan place where Bill had a fish fried whole, then walked to the dock to catch a boat taxi over to the small village of San Marcos. Boats are the easiest way to get around the lake because it's surrounded by so many volcanos and other mountains that there aren't really any big roads circling it. Pe...

This was one of our most anticipated activities while researching our trip, because come on, how cool is roasting marshmallows on an active volcano? Pacaya's last big eruption was in 2010, sending ash raining all the way to the capital 30 miles away. Lava rivers flowed even last year. We weren't expecting to see any lava (and didn't), but weren't sure what it would be like exactly. This was one case where we didn't want to research too much and spoil the surprise of the experience. We had a 6 a.m. shuttle pickup, bumped around the town's cobblestone streets for a while picking up other passengers, then started the hour-long ride to the national park. We passed through smaller villages on the ride and got some peeks into life there: horses carrying cargo, guys packed like sardines into the back of a truck headed to work, women hand washing clothes at a central public laundry pool.  At the entrance to the park, we had a quick bathroom break (water at sink but not ...