Teleferiqo

Yesterday Javier and I had a little fun being Quito tourists.  The city has a sky ride (is there another name for this? cable car ?) that takes visitors and locals alike to the top (almost) of the Pichincha volcano.  Ok, it doesn't go all the way to the top, but it gets you pretty far.  Some travelers select to hike the rest of the way to truly summit the volcano.   Yours truly decided to pack some sandwiches and a bottle of wine to picnic instead.  We may do the hike someday, but we both agreed our first time up would be a relaxing one.  (As high as we are in Quito (9,350 ft), we knew the altitude of Pichinicha (13,280 ft when you step off the cable car) may make the climb all the more difficult.)

A little welcome written in stone to start off the trip. 

A quick 8 minute ride and we were at the top! As I've said before, the pictures just don't do the view justice!

We (for whatever reason) really wanted to try to find our apartment building.  This is Javier using the last couple seconds of the binoculars that someone else had paid for and abandoned to try to find our building.  He found it! It was actually easy enough to see without the aid of the binoculars.  And once we found it, we kept using it to figure out where other city attractions where (things look a little different from so far up!).

Ok, do you see the red brick building that has a kind of short white building in front of it? (in the not quite center, but a little up and to the left of this picture)  That's our building!

Mostly we just marveled at the view.  Breathtaking doesn't seem to cover it.  Even with some clouds in the sky (that kept us from seeing some surrounding volcanos) the city was just gorgeous

There is also a little chapel at the top so we took a walk and checked it out.  This seems to be a Quito thing: having a church everywhere.  And being this close to the sky certainly makes you feel heavenly

You can kind of see the 'top' of Pichincha under cloud cover in the left of this picture.  And the adorable little chapel.

It was small inside

but had gorgeous stained glass windows!

 And everywhere we walked there seemed to be another view to document.

We also randomly ran into some VT students that are in Quito for a study abroad semester.   My Virginia sweatshirt helped us make friends. 

We found a great place to put our blanket down (our picnic blanket made the short list of items that made it to Quito!) and have our lunch.

After our lunch we walked just a little ways down the path.  Just off the trail (the barbed wire was already propped up so you could slide underneath) we found another awesome view where the mountains kind of meet.  Its hard to describe and (per usual) the photo below doesn't do it justice, but it was REALLY cool to see.

As we were walking back I made Javier take one more picture of the farm land we could see off in the distance.  It's harder to see in the picture but the land was laid out like a grid and looked super cool. (You guys just need to come here and see if for yourself...it awesome)

The ride down is scary cool too because you have the view as you descend.  

It was a great way to spend a couple hours and definitely made our 'do with folks when they come visit' list!