Flights + Learning Spanish... Day 3!

Hola!!

So, super cool update re: getting to Ecuador. I was on Kayak looking at prices, trying to decide based on baggage allowances whether it'd be worth an extra $250 a person to take an extra 50 lbs each with us... when I saw an ad for the American Airlines AAdvantage MasterCard. 30,000 bonus miles if you spend $1000 in the first three months (NOT. HARD.) I had talked previously with my very savvy father-in-law, Ken, about these types of deals and they come highly recommended from him. So... I applied, and was accepted automatically. Yay! So I look up the awards chart for the card, and it turns out that each one-way flight to Ecuador on off-peak season (which is 10 months of the year) is 15,000 miles ... which means we will be flying to Ecuador FREE. WHOO-HOO! It will get us to Quito. We have one short 55-minute flight to Cuenca after that... the next day, probably. 

Organizing which visas to get and where... I like to PLAN ... I know we have time, but the sooner I get this stuff planned out, the sooner I can relax :-) Honestly, the thing I'm most anxious about is cleaning out the garage and the guest bedroom closet. There is SO MUCH STUFF in there. If we're going to rent out this place, fully furnished or not, we're gonna have to purge. It'll feel good, I keep telling myself. It'll feel good. What I'm thinking is if we do the garage first, we'll have someplace to put all the crap from the closet. Right? RIGHT?!

Well, it is day 3 of my Spanish learning journey. I've noticed that Spanish is SO much easier than German and in Florida, Spanish is very useful... it really opens the doors to a whole new world here. I'm already speaking full sentences. Complicated sentences? No. But sentences nonetheless. :-) 

Today I said the following (and I'm very proud of it!): 

• "I want more cats."
• "It is my big lizard."
• "It is a big cat."
• "Do you want to eat pasta for dinner?"

And a bunch of other really useful things. I'm using Cat Spanish and Duolingo (sorry if you already knew that), both of which approach things in slightly different ways but they're both interesting and I'm learning quite a bit from both.

Escribo más luego!!

Caitlin