The bus from Nicaragua to Honduras didn’t actually leave from Granada. It left from Managua, the capital of Nicaragua, headed for Tegucigalpa, the capital of Honduras. We had heard bad things about Managua (”it’s dangerous,” “there’s absolutely nothing to see,” “if you can in any way avoid it, you should”) and although we had heard these types of warnings about other capital cities, these seemed particularly universal and foreboding.

Unfortunately, the bus left Managua at 5am — too early for us to catch a bus from Granada to Managua the same day. Our options were to go to Managua and spend the night, or to take a $30 taxi from Granada to Managua that morning. We opted for the taxi. (more…)

We arrived in Granada, excited for the sites and low prices. We picked a hotel from the Lonely Planet and had the taxi driver take us to it. We walked in to ask the price and were shocked to hear how out of our price range it was - over $20 per person. We started wandering around to look for a better deal.

We went one street over and found all the deals. It turned out that the hostel we were looking for was right around the corner. There were two places with similar names: one was a “hospedaje” and one was a “hotel.” While we obviously wanted to cheaper one, the taxi brought us to the upscale hotel option. We found a place, settled in, and turned on Forrest Gump.

That night we walked around Calle La Calzada that was lined with cute restaurants, bars, and people lounging around at outside tables watching people go by. We settled on a restaurant that had some Mexican food and sat down at an outside table. We had noticed some girls sitting behind us and thought that maybe one or both of them were “family,” as we like to say. (more…)

Uncle Greg and Aunt Susan generously dropped us off at the bus station in Liberia after dropping off Channing, Whitney and Tony at the airport. It cut out at least one bus ride for us — probably more.

When we arrived, we discovered that the bus left an hour later than we thought it did. So the four of us decided to get lunch together. Despite telling the waitress (and reminding her several times) that we had to eat and leave within half an hour, our food didn’t arrive until it was past time for us to go. We all ended up wolfing down our food in record time and running out to the car.

“We’re the Barkers. This is how we do it,” said Uncle Greg. “We’re late in every country, in any place, at any time…” (more…)