Paid US $47 for another week here at Posada Don Carlos. No word on the rack other than what it says on the tracking page for USPS: Your item left the United States from ISC SAN FRANCISCO at 4:44 PM on July 11, 2010. If it happens to get here before the week is up I’ll leave and try to get the difference back on the hotel bill. I’m really anxious about getting back on the road. I think it’s because of how slow I’ve been moving for the past couple weeks and now that I’m healthy I want to take advantage of it.

Staying here hasn’t been so bad. My only complaint is that it gets a little loud sometimes with the kids playing and people talking on the couch that sits right outside my window. The windows are those kind with glass slats that don’t shut all the way so it’s like they’re sitting right there in the room with me. It helps with my Spanish so it’s not so bad I guess. The weather has been a mix of sprinkles all day or mostly cloudy with steady rain in the late afternoon/evenings. The cool weather is nice though. Been a couple nights now when I wish I owned a pair of pants.

Lot’s of good places to eat around town. I’ve been hitting up the street vendors a lot more since a good meal with a couple beers can be had for $5 vs. the $12-$15 for a restaurant meal and drinks. There a couple ice cream places that I’ve been frequenting quite a bit too.

I haven’t had much of a desire to hop on a boat and visit any of the villages that surround the lake since I’ve seen a good share of quaint Mayan villages and I don’t need to be buying anything. That might change if the weather looks like it might cooperate for the day. Lounging around watching movies on TV, catching up on Entourage and The Office and web surfing from the comfort of a warm bed is enough excitement for me when I get to take breaks like this.

Been doing a lot of reading about Guatemala and Russia (Stalin mostly–what a freaking monster and Time magazine even made him Man of the Year–twice). It’s funny how differently he was portrayed back in school (Canada) when we studied Russian history. This ended up starting a Wikipedia link bonanza where I’d being reading one article, see another interesting reference and open that up in other tab for later reading. Killed the entire day doing that yesterday.

Grabbed a bunch of free books using iBooks on my iTouch that I love so much (even though iOS 4 sucks–poor battery life, lame multi-tasking and app crashes, folders are awesome though). One of the books was a report prepared by the United States Army on the effects of the atomic bombs that were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Talk about chilling. We sure do a good job of blowing the crap out each other.

Not sure if I’ll do this yet but I might end up just hitting Antigua for a volcano tour and then just riding into El Salvador and skipping the run up to the northeast to see the ruins at Copan. We’ll see what happens with the rack delivery and how it messes with my 90 day travel limit.