Hotel Santa Lucia

As many of you saw in my rankings, one of the top activities to which I was looking forward was our stay at the Santa Lucia Hotel in Cuenca (a beautiful old city that is one of Ecuador's four UNESCO World Heritage Sites). Nan and Mark kindly gave us this as a gift for our wedding. Well, it was amazing! As is the case with many buildings here in Cuenca, the lobby is a converted courtyard that absolutely takes your breath away as you enter. When we arrived, we were greeted with some yummy fruity drinks that tasted as though they had a hint of rose petals. Poor Jeff didn´t get very much because I quickly finished mine and then went ahead and had his as well. They insisted on carrying our bags everywhere, which is really nice after lugging those heavy things around much of Ecuador! The beds were amazingly comfortable – I will admit to watching a couple movies yesterday evening. I haven´t had many chances to watch TV! To really put things over the edge, we were brought a wonderful plate of fruit in the evening, filled with strawberries, pineapple and papaya (Ok, I admit we didn´t eat the papaya). Jeff had to carry me out kicking and screaming today at 11:58 (checkout was at noon).

It was difficult to get our thank you sign and the hotel sign in the same picture, so we had to do a separate close up.  I spent more time on the sign than I'd like to admit.  One more picture in the full post.

 The courtyard