Today is the beginning of our fantastic trip to the Galápagos Islands!
We left home yesterday at 3am for an early flight to Quito, Ecuador. We finally arrived at our very nice hotel around 8pm. Since we are meeting a boat for our Galápagos trip, we flew in one day early, just in case. Luckily, the government shutdown didn’t interfere with our flights and everything ran smoothly. Whew!
We stayed at the Eurobuilding Hotel, aka EB Hotel. It was a very nice place, with an excellent restaurant. We didn’t take a lot of pictures of the hotel, but we probably should have. One thing we noticed is that they put out beautiful flowers in the lobby area. These are HUGE arrangements of stunning roses! I took this picture including the chair – just so you can get an idea of how gigantic these arrangements are.
We forgot to take a picture of our room, so I downloaded one from the website. The reason is, this was a crazy bathroom setup. The “wall” past the bed is actually a glass wall into the shower and rest of the bathroom! The entire bathroom had glass walls and doors. It was very odd. For the glass shower wall into the bedroom, there was a button you could push to lower a shade between the panes of glass for some privacy.
I wish we had thought to take a better picture to show this. I have no idea why anyone would want glass walls between the bathroom and bed. ?!?
We walked around the hotel a bit and saw some neat art that was a sneak peek of things to come – lots of sea lions and sea turtles!
Other than that, we just rested up, waiting for our flight to the Galápagos. The hotel has a very nice restaurant, where we had dinner and a nice breakfast in the morning.
Dinner was delicious, and had a beautiful presentation. So, of course, we have to show you…
This was an Ecuadoran potato soup. The small dish has roasted corn. They were very hard and crunchy.
I had a pork tenderloin dish, and Jeff had homemade ravioli.
Dessert was also great. We had some homemade ice cream and a chocolate mousse.
That’s it for our first day. Tomorrow is a big day!
NOTE about our photos: For this trip, we used our iPhone 17 Pros for all land photography. I decided not to bring my larger SLR camera setup because this phone model takes fantastic photos. And, I didn’t need a zoom lens because all the animals are so very close to us. I did use a non-Apple camera app, which I liked much better than the standard Apple Camera app. We used the ProCamera app by Cocologics. For underwater pics, we used Olympus (now called OM Systems) Tough TG-5 and TG-6 cameras. We’ve used them for a few years and really like them.