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 Zadie woke up early this morning and wrote in her journal about Guatemala:

    "Gwotumolu is cool and osum. A litl uv both."

Before we get to why, I'll talk about our travel here. Stories about the actual mechanics of travel are inevitably boring (delayed for some reason or another, spoiler alert: we got there in the end), but I'll record it for posterity's sake anyway. I won't be offended if you skip reading this post. :) 

Current COVID rules for Guatemala do not require fully vaccinated travelers to provide negative test results. All our American Airlines info agreed, but still wouldn't let me check in online unless I attested that I had negative test results in hand. We ended up going to the airport 3 hours early just in case we needed to get a rapid test, but they checked our vaccine cards and we got our boarding passes. Hooray! 

RDU must have staffing shortages, because the majority of the restaurants were closed when we looked for dinner. We ate, played some Uno Flip, killed some time, killed more time after our flight was delayed an hour. When we finally started boarding, the pilot came out and said, no joke, "This plane is broken. We need to find a new plane." Back to killing time. 


We finally left around 11:20 pm (originally 7:30), landed in Miami, and took a quick Uber to our airport hotel at 2:00 am. (Side note: Our Uber was a Tesla, first time riding in one, and that was a niiiice car. Great view of the full moon through the humongous moonroof.) We had an oddly large hotel room and spent an oddly short time in it - left the room at 6:15 am for speedy hotel breakfast and then back to the airport.


Everything went much more smoothly the second day, and we were all decently cheery for running on little sleep. No wait at security, no flight delays. Our flight from Miami to Guatemala City was <3 hrs, and we landed around 9:30 am local time. 


Getting through customs was a fast and easy 3 steps - vaccine card check, passport check, declaration. We connected to the airport wifi and booked an Uber for the ~1 hr ride to Antigua. On the drive, we saw some of busy Guatemala City (we were surprised at how many US-based chains we saw there, including "La Casa de Waffle"), drove through some twisty scenic mountain roads, and finally over the  old cobblestone streets of Antigua.

Our driver took us right to our AirBnB in a townhouse, and my (terrible) Spanish was enough to communicate our reservation details to the guard and get our key. 

Boring travel notes over! We'll be exploring and getting settled more today. 

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