Road trippin’. I love it. Going for a road trip is always a fun, and exciting experience, at least in my personal opinion. When I’m at home and going on a road trip (usually to Florida), I get so excited. There is something about riding/driving for a long distance that brings you closer to the people you’re in the car with. Some of my favorite childhood memories took place on a road trip to Florida. Listening to good music, working on your geography, and spending time with the people in the car are all great things that I look forward to. Anything can happen on a road trip. Some of it is good, some of it is not so good, but you can never know what to expect on a road trip.
On our most recent travel day, we went road trippin, and not all of it went as planned.
CHALLENGE FOR YOU READERS! How many different buses/cars/metal things with wheels did we take and how much did we spend in a metal thing with wheels total?! Leave your answer to that question in the comments section!
The goal was to meet up with the rest of the squad in Pasto, Colombia on Saturday, February 3, so our team left on the 2nd from Salento, Colombia. We had spent a few days camping there and had planned to leave on Friday. We left at about 1:30 on Friday afternoon for Pasto. We had to take a jeep ride into town from our Hostel for an hour bus ride to Armenia to catch a bus to Pasto, but that’s not how it worked out. We got to Armenia and they said there was no direct bus to Pasto from there, so we had to take another 4 hour bus ride to get to Cali and then took about a 8 hour bus ride overnight to Pasto landing us there at about 5 in the morning. We slept for a good portion of the day to recover from our marathon travel day and prepared to meet up with the rest of our squad that night. The next day started early at around 5:30 am to prepare for travel day #2, but this time we were crossing borders into Ecuador. We took a bus from the hostel to the Colombia-Ecuador border (2 hours). When we got there, we had to wait a long time to get through customs, and by a long time, it was 3 hours of waiting in Colombia and another 3 hours waiting through Ecuadorian customs, so a total of 6 hours at the border. Once we finally got through customs in Ecuador, we grabbed a taxi bus to Tulcán, Ecuador which was about 20-30 minutes. Once we were there, we were going to grab a bus to Quito, Ecuador. It was a bit of a headache getting the tickets because you could only purchase 2 at a time, or so we were told, and we had 20 people with a ridiculously long line behind us, so 10 people waited in line to purchase the tickets. Once we had them, the time the bus was supposed to depart was 3:50 pm. It was 4:00, so we had to book it to get to the bus. Luckily, we made it as the bus was pulling up. We threw our bags in the bus and found our seats, and we were on our way to Quito- a 5-7 hour drive. Once we arrived, it was about 11 pm and we were all so tired. So much for watching the Super Bowl. We got to the Hostel we were supposed to be staying at around midnight, and they said that the check in time was 10 o’clock and they were closed, so we couldn’t stay there. I know, it’s strange. We hopped back in our taxis and went back to the bus station that we were supposed to take a bus from in the morning to get to Baños, Ecuador for debriefing. We wound up taking a 2:15 am bus to get to Baños which was about a 4 hour ride getting us to the bus station in Baños around 6 am. We walked the 10 minutes between the bus station and the hostel we were supposed to arrive at later in the day. Thank the good Lord above that they had room for all of us and we didn’t have to find other lodging. After what seemed like an eternity, our travel days had finally come to a close as we hopped in our beds and drifted off to sleep around 6:30 am. I woke up at 1:30! I burned so much daylight, but I guess it was necessary.
With all of our unexpected, and totally unforeseeable road blocks, it was still an awesome day. I loved the adventure, and it makes for one heck of a story later. We got to see the countries via bus, we got to talk to our squad-mates about the adventures in missions that they had over the course of their week in ministry went and spend some time with them. Even though the days were exhausting, and I wound up sick at the end of them, I still wouldn’t trade them for anything and would totally do it all again. Even though traveling can test your patience, it can teach you things about people and places, and it can teach you things about yourself. You can’t always know what is going to come of your road trippin’, but sometimes the detour is what you needed instead of the direct path.
#chacoboutadventure
