My first adventure out of the country – February/March 2007.
Passport Woes
I applied for my passport the first week of December in plenty of time for my trip the last week of February. But my birth certificate got lost somewhere in the process. I eventually got a replacement about the same time the old one was found. By early February, three weeks before my trip, I knew I would need to spend a long day at the passport office in San Francisco to be certified to leave the country.
After all this trouble you would think I would hold on to it. But no. The second week of my trip I left it in a bank in Xela where I was trying in vain to change a travelers check into quetzales. I blithely left the bank without it and did not discover the error until three days later when I tried to get out of Guatemala and into El Salvador.
My stay in Guatemala lasted an extra three days while I got a replacement. The process might have been faster but the airport and the U. S. Embassy were closed because of the arrival of President Bush. I thoroughly enjoyed my extra “found” vacation time.
Week 1 – Antigua
I did not arrive on Saturday as I had planned. My flight was canceled because the Dallas/Fort Worth Airport was closed because of high winds.
Consequently I missed the first Sunday of Lent which in Antigua is celebrated with an elaborate parade through the streets. Brian was there though and you can get a taste of it from his picture on the left.
Language School
We attended language school at La Union for four days. My marginal Spanish definitely improved and Brian, shown here with his teacher, brushed up on his competency.
We both feel the school was excellent and would recommend it highly.
Coffee Plantation
While we were in Antigua we visited the local coffee plantation. The shade grown coffee is raised organically under a canopy of trees. The coffee plants are around five feet tall and each year each plant yields a five pound hand-picked harvest which, after several steps of drying, hull removal, and roasting, yields about one pound of coffee. And you wondered why it is so expensive!
Young coffee plants are ready to plant out after a year of initial growth
Each coffee flower becomes a coffee berry… which is handpicked when it turns red.
The coffee is dried in a huge yard behind the company and is frequently turned by hand in bins as it continues to dry.
The City
Antiqua has a number of now picturesque ruins that are the result of an earlier disaster. (Guatemala is plagued with disasters. More on that later.)
In 1773, a series of earthquakes destroyed much of the town. The Spanish Crown ordered (1776) the removal of the capital to a safer location, where Guatemala City, the modern capital of Guatemala, now stands. The badly damaged city was ordered abandoned, although not everyone left.
Click here for more on Antigua.
The “new” city is still reminiscent of an earlier time with cobblestone streets and people retrieving firewood from the surrounding mountains to cook their food. But the old ways are often overshadowed by the new. It is not only the smoke from thousands of stoves that dims the view of the nearby volcanoes and makes one long for a breath of clean air, it is the diesel belching from thousands old cars and buses.
While we were in Antigua we stayed at the home of Delia Ramirez de Parada and Carlos Enrique Parada. They provided us with good food, fine company, and comfortable accommodations. We could not have asked for anything better. 
The entrance to their house is directly on the street (to the left in the photo of the courtyard). A covered tiled walkway runs along the side and back of an open courtyard. The bedrooms are off this side hall. This is a view from my room.
At the end of the back hall there is a sink that serves for both the kitchen and the laundry. The door to the right is the bathroom. The next door is the kitchen and to the right (out of the photo) is the dining room.
The house has a tin roof. It is spacious, elegant and simple. It is the house Delia was born in.
We would like to have stayed longer.
Only nine days without rain and/or snow. The wettest March in one hundred years. We at least have a roof over our heads. But that’s yet 
This Purple of Romagna artichoke is the centerpiece of one of the vegetable beds.
Today is the first day of July. I am reveling in raspberries. I hung CDs amongst the berries to flash in the sunlight and scare the birds away. It’s working. Those flashing CDs even startle me, but I don’t scare easily.
A heat wave, and a surfeit of cucumbers, peppers, parsley, tomatoes, potatoes and garlic left me with only a field of wildflowers at Wildseed Farms outside of Fredericksburg, Texas, to show you.
