Quito, Ecuador

I loved Quito. From the second that you arrive at the airport, it’s just beautiful.

The airport is an hour out from the city, but it’s worth it because the drive was awesome.

Quito is supposedly known for the way it was able to be built while still leaving plenty of green space. It definitely shows when you are there. Outside of the jungle, I felt like my heart was at home in Quito the second most through my travels.

The other thing is that our family has had a babysitter/almost member of our family since I was like 7 years old named Bridgette and she is from Quito. We’ve been close with her for so long and it was really special to be in her hometown. Mariel and I stayed with some of her family. We hung out with the 21-year old son of her best friend and I got lunch with her 86(ish?) year old mom.

That part was really special and they were all amazing.

Quito as a city is also really cool.

• We went to the center of the world (0 latitude, 0 longitude) — although someone recently told me that we weren’t at the exact center. Unclear, but definitely in the vicinity. Some cool physics stuff going on there
• Went to this really cool museum of the city that was super informative and had a beautiful view of Quito

• Went to the crater of this old volcanic area that had people living inside

Those were the big highlights. Wish I got some more time there, but I really wanna go back.

Thoughts

I had this thought when I was there that is going to stick with me for a while — when they were developing the city, it must have been a handful of people that laid out how it would look. They decided to construct it with all of the green space instead of knocking everything down, and whoever was in charge of those people (likely someone in the government) gave them the go ahead/put them in power. Because of that small group of people, Quito is beautiful today. If it had been different people in their shoes, they would have knocked down all the green and my experience (as well as all so many other people) would have been dramatically different.

That small group of people did something really special.

Everyone there was also so nice. Was a really cool trend.