One week until President's Day...in Guatemala!

We just finished a busy week of planning, teaching, sending out progress reports, and being observed by Mr. Large. Next week we have to administer IOWA standardized tests (you can't even escape standardized testing in Costa Rica!), but after that we are free. Country Day School observes many American holidays, and fortunately for us, Presidents Day is one of them.
We were planning on going to Arenal Volcano for the 3-day weekend, but yesterday we change our plans when we learned about some special flight deals being offered. TACA, the main Costa Rican airline company, has a limited offer to fly round trip to most countries in Central America for only $99. We went to Panama pretty recently, all of the flights to Belize were booked, and we are going to live hours away from the Nicaraguan border next year in Guanacaste. The flights to Honduras did not fit our schedule very well either, and although flights to El Salvador were really cheap, it only took a little bit of reading about the skyrocketing murder rate to steer us away from that idea. With those countries ruled out, we settled on a place that neither of us know much about: Guatemala!
We were unsure about Guatemala at first because we thought that the main reason to go there was to see the Mayan ruins in Tikal. However, Tikal is 10 hours away from Guatemala City, and we did not want to spend our short 3 day weekend driving the whole time. Then we read about Antigua. A beautiful colonial city in the mountains, only about an hour from Guatemala City, surrounded by 3 active volcanoes, and bordering "the most beautiful lake in the world." We were sold. We bought our tickets online during a break in the school day (today was the final day to take advantage of the offer). Now all we have to do is figure out where we will stay.
It might seem crazy to write a blog about a place that we haven't even been to yet, but we are so excited about Guatemala that we just had to share about it. So when we are giving IOWA test to our kids next week, you can be sure that we will be dreaming about stepping on that plane and flying up North.