We took an old school bus 5 hours to Gracias. It was actually a nice ride - the bus wasn't very full and Gracias is in the mountains making it a really pretty route.
This was our hotel lobby. It did rain on us through the hole one day which was pretty amusing.
I enjoyed visiting in the city - we ended up staying for almost a week. It's not a large city, but there are some very good restaurants, a bunch of shops, and everyone was really friendly. (It must be growing - all of the guidebooks said there weren't any ATMs, but there are now 2!) One of Claire's first observations: "Look, they have trashcans, and people actually use them!" There's a cute coffee shop where you can sit on the second floor of a little tower in the middle of the Parque Central,so of course we took advantage of that. My favorite part of the park was the beautiful orange flowering trees.
One of the churches in town:
San Cristobol is a fort that overlooks the city. It's free which is nice, but it's also the spot where a lot of young boys hang out. This would be fine if they hadn't enjoyed trying out their English pickup lines.It was weird.
The best Nativity scene we found -- the mini pond had tadpoles in it! Second place had dinosaurs.
Lorena's sells nothing but canned foods and ice cream:
We spent a bit of time eating of course. There's a Chinese restaurant where we asked if two dishes was enough for three people. She responded "I think so"... then brought out two of the largest overflowing plates of food I have ever seen in my life. One would have been too much food. Our hotel restaurant had some amazing curry chicken. And we had a lot of tipico. Tipico changed a little depending on what meal of the day it was, but always included beans, eggs and crema with tortillas. Other additions could be cheese, avacado, fried plantains or ham. I might be back to the point where I could eat it again. Maybe. We had it a lot...
In addition we went to one of the local hot springs. The best way to describe it was like the public pool - there were a ton of people there hanging out, bringing food, listening to music. The one thing that we were surprised by though was that no one wore bathing suits. Everyone was in regular clothes jumping into the water. And if anyone did have a bathing suit they covered it with shorts and a t-shirt. We stuck out A LOT being the only blanquitas and the only ones in bathing suits. But again, no one gave us any problems about it.
We had two side trips while we were in Gracias which I'll get to separately.
