Las Cumbres

So upon returning from the weekend, we had made a bunch of new friends. I found myself compelled to be dragging my dad around spending time with our new friends as much as possible, which is why we returned to Cafe Luna Monday. We also wanted to do all the activities that week that the school organized, and everyone else felt the same. And suddenly after two weeks had felt like a long time, we had five days left before we were leaving town and only so much time to spend with new friends, as well as the fact that I had found out that the day after we were leaving they'd be climbing the volcano. Nuts.

Anyway, Tuesday we went to a place called Las Cumbres. It was called a natural sauna, but it was basically a series of steam rooms. The catch is that the steam rooms were located over steam vents from the volcano, and you basically opened a concrete lid that covered a hole down to the depths of Mordor where the steam came from. And it was HOT. You could fit 4-5 people in each room, and we predictably split up by gender and used the little changing rooms and sat in the little steam rooms, taking turns jumping in the cold shower to cool down before heading back in.

Margaret is looking at me.

Outside seating.

The little volcano on the ground there is a hole with a lid, built over one of the steam vents. Pretty cool. I thought the steam kinda smelled like fresh corn tortillas.

Here's the vent hole:

The lobby of sorts, open air, started getting drippy wet when the rain started.

After that, since we had like three hours there, people were sitting around and a storm started rolling it. We were up in the mountains more, and the storm was like on TOP of the mountain next to us. The lightning was incredible for a second- loud, bright, close. It started POURING too. Storms are cool :) Everyone else ended up inside but me being the contrarian that I am decided to stay outside and watch the storm, watch the rain roll off the tile roofs and such. It was cool. Finally I caught up with everyone else in the little restauranty place where they were having smoothies and the like. We hung out for awhile and then finally headed back, but it still wasn't too late cause we went right after school. But the rest of the night, like many, we had dinner and talked to Lily, studied, and went to bed- my dad at like 9 sometimes, me around 10:30- lots of studying and journaling to do. He was tired though- first time he's slept more than me in a long time I'm sure- but he was bushed most every night.