“I’d like to state for the record that I can swing a mean ax. My nickname for thirty seconds in Guatemala was “Beaver.” I took care of that little pickle briskly with the aforementioned ax. “
Caitlin:
Upon seeing you mention Guatemala, I went back and reread the emails that I had sent during our time there, and I came up with a few memorable quotes that warrant reprinting for all posterity:
“In other bright news, I got bitten by a puppy yesterday. Don’t worry, it was somebody’s pet and the owner said it had been vaccinated. It was so cute and tiny that I just had to pet it, but it bit down on my index finger…hard.”
“By the two-hour mark, I was feeling hot and sick, the dirt road was INCREDIBLY bumpy, and there were 4 men, 1 woman, 2 children, Caitlin, myself, 1 chicken, and 4 chicks in this truck, as well as EVERYBODY’s luggage, and a large sack of corn. This was a standard small Toyota pickup.”
“We saw a roach, a millipede, two bats, and a tarantula in the girl’s bathroom. A tarantula. An actual tarantula. I will never be able to convey the horror of seeing it creeping out of the stall. Of course Caitlin wanted put it on her head immediately.”
“I also found a centipede in the dead middle of my spotless, cozy bed just as I was about to get in. It left some crumbles of dirt and a trail of slime. I was horrified, and I slept fully clothed with my sweatshirt hood pulled all the way tight. Caitlin also warned me about bugs getting in my shoes overnight, so I slept in my hiking boots.”
“I saw a roach in the place where we were setting up our shuttle back to the airport today and I definitely turned red and teared up in terror, much to the dismay of the Spanish speaking people around me. Caitlin was so happy.”
“We also saw a tiny (most likely forbidden) cave in the side of one of the temples, so naturally we went in. It ended up being a 50-foot tunnel, and that was all, but when we turned around at the back, a bat flew towards us, trapping us in. After panicking and hiding under our plastic ponchos because the bat kept circling rapidly in the 5-foot high tunnel, we stopped to take pictures of it when it stopped to hang from the ceiling.”