At the bottom of the ever spiralling road we found a cobbled street to sleep on and prayed to Darth Vader that when we woke up we would be in Antigua!
Anyway, it worked! We woke up to the traffic noisily going past on the bumpy cobbled street. We peeped out of the window and immediately where taken by the beauty of the place, the cobbled streets, the colourful but rustic buildings, the volcanoes and the women rushing around in traditional Guatemalan dress. We went straight to the market for breakfast and then to a coffee shop to get our wedding organised.

We instantly loved Antigua. It has a buzz about it. Its modern enough but as it is a Unesco World Heritage site everything looks the same as it did years and years ago. There is a Mcdonalds and even a subway hidden in there somewhere but we couldn’t find it. No golden arches here! A really refreshing change which we loved after the madness of Honduras and Guatemala City.
We sipped coffee and watched the world pass us by while we made plans, we also met our first wedding guests there, Aaron and Ryan! We watched a local man torment a very elderly women, she wasn’t one to be messed with!  It was like a scene out of ‘Last of the summer wine’!  We couldn’t help but take a sneaky video!

In the afternoon we went to meet Anita who had helped us to plan our Antigua wedding and would be providing the location. We clicked straight away and we could tell Anita was going to make our 14th wedding so special. She showed us around her family’s old home which also been a shop and is now a beautiful restaurant. Everything had been kept as original as possible and new things were still being discovered in the walls of the building!

We had fallen in love with the place and the view from the terrace was spectacular. We managed to talk ourselves out of watching the sunset there that night to keep it a surprise for our wedding day.
We left with a spring in our step, romance in our hearts and food on our minds and decided to treat ourselves to a meal in one of the many lovely restaurants.
We chose Hectars and settled down to huge field mushrooms smothered in garlic and butter, beef carpaccio and duck breast with gratin dauphinois…oh AND 2 bottles of wine! Eek, we were there for 3 hours and really enjoyed every minute of it.

It was so nice to feel so relaxed. We had found a quieter street to park on so staggered back to Peggy for a much needed drunken sleep.
The next day we had been invited by Anita to the hotel for breakfast and to use the internet so we dragged our sorry hungover selves there and enjoyed a great breakfast, where we met more lovely wedding guests from London! Julia and her husband -I’m so sorry, I am terrible with names:-(  had just arrived the previous night and were excited to be our guests and to hear our travel tales and we equally loved hearing theirs.
They went off to see the sights and we were relaxing using the internet when we were presented with a key! Anita had arranged for us to stay at the hotel for the night before the wedding so we had a beautiful room to get ready in! We were so grateful and couldn’t believe the Anita’s generosity. We rushed into our gorgeous room and flopped onto the bed.
Once we had gotten over the shock Alex went straight into the shower. It was hot and amazing, he was in there for half an hour and I followed suit! After an afternoon snooze we did more exploring and found a gorgeous little restaurant that was in a landscaped courtyard and had a lovely little lunch and felt like we were ‘home’ for the first time in the trip! We talked of how we could live in Antigua, it had all of its original charm but all of the amenities we love, great food, great people, great local produce and the availability of imported things. (we love to cook so couldn’t live without our random ingredients every now and then). We just loved it all so much. We were giddy with the idea of living there and spent the afternoon talking about it inbetween snoozing and catching up with the blog and of course mentally preparing for our 14th wedding day!