This morning as I enjoyed my daily constitutional I was reading our guidebook about Suchitoto. Our current plan is to arrive San Salvador at the culo-crack of dawn Saturday morning and directamente subimos al colectivo para Suchitoto. Well, in my reading this morning I found three things:

1. The plan is perfect, Saturday hosts a year round fair - perfecto!
2. Directions in Suchitoto are weak
3. The plan has to change

Plan is perfect

Turns out that Suchitoto was once a major city and is near a capital city for a while, though now it is mostly artists in the town and farmers who were displaced by the building of a reservoir who are now fisherman. That sounds pretty decent and the many museums and artisan studios sound enticing, but the day that sounds most important is Saturday. We knew that Saturday and Sunday would be an important day for our trip to find local markets and we have 3 Saturdays in country, but just 2 Sundays and trying to fit our agenda in and get to the right places on those days is a concern. Fortunately, Suchitoto is only 47km away from San Salvador so we should be able to make it there pretty quickly after bajamos del avion. Having events on Sautrday all year at the Teatro de Las Ruinas sounds like we should be able to have a perfect welcome into El Salvador on our first day. However, where the hell is the Tetro de Las Ruinas? And thus begins my list of places to bookmark...

Directions in Suchitoto are weak

So, as I'm reading places to go there are directions like "From the Church, go South on this street for a while, then make a left, then go past a smoldering garbage dump, then knock on the door of the house and a kid inside will guide you to the waterfalls". Well, that just doesn't sit very well with me. I'm a geek. A mi me gusta la tecnologia. So, I'm finally going to get myself a GPS. For Christmas Nikki did some research on GPS and gave me permission to buy a GPS. She knows that I like the research almost as much as the owning of a gadget so she often gets me permission to get something instead of the actual item - it's a nice deal. My initial research was that I want a GPS that will have

• colored maps down to the street level so I can walk/drive/bike in new cities more confidently
• decent coverage in dense forest and urban canyons
• to be able to load/unload maps and waypoints and paths into a computer to share with others
• something small enough that I won't mind having it in my pocket
• not to spend a ton

It looks like Garmin map software and support is the best, which is somewhat important to me so I'm pretty set on Garmin at the moment. Since doing my research Garmin has added "x" to the titles of their units meaning they are now expandable using flash memory. Being a geek, I have buckets of flash memory sitting around, but of course not in the format that these need :(

Right now the GPSMAP76Cx is the leader in my list - 7.6 ounces, runs on AA for 18 hours, turn-by-turn directions, quad-helix-antenna, and an REI rebate makes it competitive with the cheaper models.

For now, the basic plan is to get a waypoint and at least one photo of every destination we visit and maybe a route or two getting from the bus depot to the town center, or the town center to the destinations.

I do plan on writing more about the technology gear we're brining along in the future...cameras, journal, compu, what else do I want (and what might I be able to convince Nikki to buy...).

The Plan has to Change

Suchitoto has no ATM nor Bank. So, instead of "getting directly on the bus" we may need to "hit an ATM and then get directly on the bus." Of course, El Salvador uses the USDollar so we may just bring some extra from the US and since it's only going to be about $25/day in general we don't need to have thousands on us to make this work.

Suchitoto Dreaming

So, what sounds like fun to me in Suchitoto. Well, the market on Saturday and just orienting ourselves in town. The Tourist Center has bike rental for $1/hour so we'll almost certainly take advantage of that. On Saturday day a tour of Galleria de Arte Shanay, Galleria de Arte Lucia Canas followed by dinner at La Villa Balanza sounds pretty good. For Sunday a trip down to the lake to see Casa Museo Alejandro Cotto sounds pretty good followed by a boat ride on the lake that takes us to the cascada Los Tercios and perhaps then we'll be on a bus to La Palma Sunday afternoon, but that is my proxima cuenta.