...and boy it was. Giovanni and I can be spontaneous, sometimes. And this weekend we wanted to get out of the city, so we chose Manizales, a small city about 5 hours drive from Medellin, as the destination of our choice. We set off in the early afternoon on Saturday, realizing how spontaneous our decision was when it took us 2 hours just to get outside of Medellin due to a bicycle race going on and the roads being closed off. Since there are really only 2 ways out of Medellin (to the north and to the south) there wasn't much we could do besides wait with the rest of the travelers who had been at a dead stop since 10 a.m. that morning. When we saw abandoned cars sitting in the middle of the 2-lane road and people having block party-style meet ups every few hundred meters, we realized there wasn't much we could do and stuck it out. By the time we got rearing to go we were already hungry, so we stopped at a famous fish soup place on the side of the highway. We managed to get to Manizales by nightfall, which was lucky since once the sun set we were getting chilly up in the mountains.
The next day we went around the city, saw the famous bits, and head off back for Medellin. Our total time in Manizales was less than 24 hours. But we stopped numerous times along the way both there and back, resting our bums, eating, putting on our rain jackets, again to wait out an aggressive thunderstorm, and getting pulled over by the police (only once!). As we arrived soaking wet to Medellin on Sunday evening Giovanni kept kindly reminding me that it was all about the journey!
Did I mention the entire 10+ hour trip in 2 days was on a motorbike??
Giovanni getting directions for a lovely old man on a deserted Sunday
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