All the Way to Pedernales

Tom had a couple of internet friends he wanted to contact in Pedernales, so we drove all the way from Manta to Pedernales in one day, not realizing that it was Saturday and all he had was work contact info. We made a few quick stops along the way, but all of these were repeated at length on the way back south, so I'll save them for later.

Pedernales is just north of the equator and I watched for some kind of indication as we drove north but didn't see any. Seriously bummed, I'm determined to find the equator on the way back south.

We arrived in Pedernales late on Saturday afternoon and took the first hotel room we found for nights 4 and 5 - at the Hotel Juan Carlos, directly across the street from the beach. This place was definitely mid-century shabby, but at least clean.

There's the hotel - the doorway right next to the orange storefront. We had the room with the open window just to the right of the restaurant sign.

No WiFi <sigh>.

The SIM cards we bought for our phones included data minutes, but I never could connect to the internet. I kept getting "Network Unavailable" messages. So then I tried to create a hot spot with my phone, but my electronics were having no part of internet connectivity. And when I rebooted my phone, it insisted I was in central Europe, even with GPS turned on, and added 7 hours to local time. OK. Two days without internet won't kill me.

The beach was jumping all of Saturday night into Sunday morning, but by Sunday afternoon, all was quiet.

We didn't go anywhere on this tour bus, just thought it was picture-worthy.

Fond memories of Pedernales include an old gent on a burro selling home-made hooch for 50 cents a shot. I didn't drink any; it smelled somewhat like you'd imagine rocket fuel to. I got to pat the burro. That was just as good.

The town itself is mostly agricultural with lots of feed and seed stores and even someone selling baby chicks on the street corner.

On Monday morning, we finally caught up with one of Tom's internet friends and then left Pedernales behind.

And I finally found the equator! We turned around and took pictures at the real estate sign on the northbound side of E15...

because the official sign, only on the southbound side of E15, is well hidden behind some lush greenery and fairly inaccessible.

Satisfied to have found the landmark, we headed south to check out beaches.