Today I flew from San Francisco to Guatemala City via Dallas. On the planes I cracked into a faded paperback copy of 1984 and brainstormed assignments for the Zero Tuition College experiment. We found a driver from the lovely, centrally located, and utterly uninhabited Hostal Volcanes waiting for us outside the airport, and now we’re gearing up for an early morning departure to the bus station and 8-hour bus ride to Flores, Guatemala.

In a later post I’ll explain just what I’m doing in Guatemala and tell you more about my three travel partners. I’m taking pretty pictures but unfortunately I won’t be able to upload them until later!

Saludos,

Blake

### UPDATE Dec 28

As promised, here are photos of my travel partners! I snapped these in SFO airport.

Here’s Vince with his family

and Julie with her bags

and Jim hiding out all stealthfully by the gate

We’re all friends, former campers, and former co-workers from Deer Crossing Summer Camp in the California High Sierra near Lake Tahoe. We all learned how to tree climb there beginning in 2006, and since 2007 Jim had been scheming up a Guatemala tree climbing adventure. Many were invited but only a few came, and that’s our rock-solid crew. Don’t we look good together?

We’ll be climbing tree and exploring the Mayan ruins of El Mirador while in Guatemala for two weeks. If you haven’t heard of Mirador, look it up on Wikipedia, because it’s pretty awesome.