Ecuador
A world apart: Guayaquil (Drive Day 136: November 12th, 2003)
After months of slowly driving through countries, we are hopping on a plane again. Skipping huge swaths of stories, people, food, customs, buildings, roads – the things that connect the passage of time. We will depart a freezing, colonial capitol in the morning and arrive in a steamy coastal metropolis in the time it would normally take us to wake up, get gas, check our maps, drive a few hours and find lunch a few towns over.
Modern office buildings and tacky billboards have never seemed more comforting. The taxi ride from the airport to the customs office where we must collect our bill of lading takes us past symbols of commerce and present-tense civilization, grunge and all.
Follow this bonus-material blog and ride along on a one-year road trip that inspired the memoir The Drive: Searching for Lost Memories on the Pan American Highway. On sale now. Get yours through the buy-the-book links at the bottom of the landing page on my teresabrucebooks.com website or here or here. Planning a road trip? Buy the audiobook here. Like The Drive’s Facebook page and tweet back at me @writerteresa.
Camper homesick (Drive Day 135: November 11th, 2003)
Quito’s observatory only looks abandoned: peering in alerts a student to our presence and he sells us two tickets for a tour. It’s full of clocks and instruments measuring wind speed, latitude, longitude and a bunch of other things I should remember from school but now just nod and smile as though I do. Underground, four seismometers measure the continual volcanic activity of Ecuador and its roof-opening telescope measures the worlds above. Humbling, but something else as well.
There is no shortage of sights to see in Quito, but for the first time we feel like tourists instead of travelers. It hits me: in our camper, we bring our home along with us. Without it we feel naked and utterly unremarkable – just another customer for street kids selling scarves or bundled-warm women ladling out dishes of unrecognizable meat soup. I realize why it is that I’m so driven to find the camper my father built. I might have been malarial, half-starved and penniless but I belonged somewhere.
Follow this bonus-material blog and ride along on a one-year road trip that inspired the memoir The Drive: Searching for Lost Memories on the Pan American Highway. On sale now. Get yours through the buy-the-book links at the bottom of the landing page on my teresabrucebooks.com website or here or here. Planning a road trip? Buy the audiobook here. Like The Drive’s Facebook page and tweet back at me @writerteresa.
Not the place to get a haircut (Drive Day 134: November 10th, 2003)
We should stick to playing tourist in the old city. Once we venture into the “new city” I am lured into a false sense of modernity. I stop to get my haircut in a salon with hipster styles on posters tacked to its windows. Put it this way, my subsequent purchase is a wool hat. And not just to keep warm.
Follow this bonus-material blog and ride along on a one-year road trip that inspired the memoir The Drive: Searching for Lost Memories on the Pan American Highway. On sale now. Get yours through the buy-the-book links at the bottom of the landing page on my teresabrucebooks.com website or here or here. Planning a road trip? Buy the audiobook here. Like The Drive’s Facebook page and tweet back at me @writerteresa.
Freezing in Quito (Drive Day 133: November 9th, 2003)
After almost a month in tropical Panama, Quito’s altitude and temperatures are a shock. The socks I wear under my sandals (most of our clothes are in the camper) freeze to my feet after a soaking rain. This kid wants to shine Gary’s shoes, “Limpio, limpio!” but they’re sneakers. So he settles for the same price to pose for a photo.
Still, at least we don’t have to get carted off by ambulance to the hospital like another hostel guest on his first night. Turns out the beer is a little stronger here and drinking anything alcoholic at altitude tricks your heart into thinking it should curl into a little ball and stop pumping.
Follow this bonus-material blog and ride along on a one-year road trip that inspired the memoir The Drive: Searching for Lost Memories on the Pan American Highway. On sale now. Get yours through the buy-the-book links at the bottom of the landing page on my teresabrucebooks.com website or here or here. Planning a road trip? Buy the audiobook here. Like The Drive’s Facebook page and tweet back at me @writerteresa.
Heavy loads (Drive Day 132: November 8th, 2003)
My first images of South America as a child and now, fix it as a place of brute strength and hard work. The first photo is of my father’s overweight camper being off-loaded in Colombia. What it doesn’t show is the longshoreman whose finger was ripped from his hand securing the straps and cables. My mother held her hands over my ears and told me to think about Pantera instead: our little half-blind rescue cat was cowering in the camper’s hidden storage compartment.
The second photo is one Gary snaps of a woman crossing a street in Quito, where we’ve rented a room in a youth hostel while we wait for the camper to catch up with us.
Follow this bonus-material blog and ride along on a one-year road trip that inspired the memoir The Drive: Searching for Lost Memories on the Pan American Highway. On sale now. Get yours through the buy-the-book links at the bottom of the landing page on my teresabrucebooks.com website or here or here. Planning a road trip? Buy the audiobook here. Like The Drive’s Facebook page and tweet back at me @writerteresa.
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