"My alarm didn't go off." "My grandmother died."
Yeah, sure.
I'm feeling pretty good about my genuine "The volcano ate my homework" excuse. The eruption was followed by tropical storm Agatha, which caused flooding all through the weekend.
Here's a photo of a central street in Guatemala City on Sunday, with volcanic ash along all but the middle of the road. The photo at the bottom shows apparent storm damage at a construction site viewed from our hotel.
*****
80 dead. Now that we've made it back to Guatemala City and feel like we're okay, we're reading about the continuing problems that we dodged, with some alarm, on the six hour, ninety mile trip back here from our would-be quiet weekend at Lake Atitlan.
The BBC reports that "A mudslide devastated an entire neighbourhood in the Guatemalan town of San Antonio Palopa," which was the next village, just five minutes drive from the Casa Palopo Hotel, where we stayed on Thursday and Friday.
Samir & Neha here at our hotel, have provisional tickets out on Wednesday both from here and San Salvador, and are waiting to see if the Guatemala City airport does indeed open as planned tomorrow night. If not, they'll bolt for El Salvador. Joe from Phoenix has a flight out on Thursday. Ours is Wednesday.
We've walked the streets of Guatemala City today and found they're more clean than not. Volcanic ash has been pushed into piles. But if you walk under a tree in a breeze, you'll find bits of ash blowing from the branches into your eyes, and your hair. We all have Pumice Hair.
We're on Delta on Wednesday. Thinking of buying a few bags and importing exclusive Volcan Pacaya pumice, for sale in half ounce vials for a mere $9.99. You can only get 'em here. Stay tuned.
Hope to be back at home on Wednesday night and back at work on Thursday.
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