I haven’t written much over the last month. I suppose that’s pretty obvious to anyone who has been following this blog. Farrah and I have been in San Marcos la Laguna, Guatemala. We haven’t traveled much, we just kind of settled back in here at the lake, and our lives have been pretty normal, more or less.
The big news of the past month is that we celebrated our first year of marriage on June 2nd. For the occasion we spent 2 nights at Hotel Bambu, a resort in Santiago la Laguna, which is on the other side of the lake. Since we’ve traveled so little since we got back to San Marcos it was kind of novel to pack up our day packs and take off for a couple days. Our time at Bambu was great. We sat around playing cards, lounged in the hot tub, enjoyed the sauna, and generally bummed around lazily. We also enjoyed a lot of really great food at their restaurant.
Other than our excursion to Santiago we have made a couple of trips to Panajachel, where we discovered the first grocery store we’ve seen on our travels that has reminded us of a normal grocery store in the US. We’ve made a couple trips to get groceries there since, and it’s nice to be able to switch between that and the organic food delivery service we have used here. The grocery store has much more to choose from.
We’ve also visited San Juan and San Pedro several times. We have some cool pictures posted on Facebook and Instagram from the day that we visited the mirador in San Pedro. The views of the lake were pretty spectacular, which I suppose is to be expected. Who the hell would build a mirador with shitty views?
We’ve also been doing some hiking with our friend Mingo. Two weeks ago we hiked from San Marcos to San Juan along the lake shore. Really, it’s more of a picturesque stroll along the lake shore occasionally passing near local farmers. In addition to some of the tallest corn stalks I’ve ever seen (10 ft, maybe?), we saw several cows and a bunch of goats that tried to block our path. I assume they just wanted to hangout with us. Last week, we went the opposite direction and we hiked from San Marcos to Santa Cruz. I had done this hike with Mingo once before, but this was Farrah’s first time. The hike takes you above the shore of the lake from Tzununa to Santa Cruz. The first bit from San Marcos to Santa Cruz is just a walk along the road between the towns. The rest of the hike is a lot of up and down, with nice shade, and great views of the lake. I really enjoyed this one a second time, and we had perfect weather, right up until we arrived in Santa Cruz and it promptly started to rain.
You may have noticed that the above activities don’t even come close to taking up a month of time. So, what else have we been doing?
I’ve been playing the mandolin a lot. I’m operating under the assumption that if I do it enough, one day I will appear not to suck. So far, I am still not great. But as these things go, I’m much better than I was at the beginning of the year. It definitely has helped to have lots of free time. I’ve also read some books, and dabbled with ChatGPT, and programming in Flutter, but I got bored with that exercise pretty quickly. I’ve also been doing a little bit of consulting with a group I helped a bit at the end of last year. I can honestly say that after 9 months without working I still don’t miss it.
Farrah has been continuing to work on her yoga practice and finding new ways to teach. She has a weekly class here that I’ve started to attend. For those who are counting, I have now taken about 10 times as many yoga classes this year as I normally require, so 10 classes. She’s also offered a couple of online offerings, the next of which is coming up this Saturday, you can sign up here. She’s also been getting out to more events than I have. In part, because she’s more interested in ecstatic dance than I am, and in part because she made some friends here in our building and they went out to hangout together several times. Sadly, those friends have since left the lake, but it was good while it lasted.
I think that’s about all I can say about our last month at Lake Atitlan. It’s been nice and laid back, and we’ve had a lot of time to pursue our interests. The next big thing will be our trip back to Denver in less than 2 weeks. We will be back in town for 5 nights of String Cheese Incident, and visiting with friends, but more about that later.