I slept well but not too long after all the napping I'd done in the van yesterday. After a lazy breakfast Scott and I ran a few errands. We stopped at the post office and then walked around the blocks near our hotel. I bought a replacement Nalgene bottle for the one I dropped on the glacier. We also found a fold out map of Ecuador with all the volcanoes and brief climbing descriptions of them. In trying to pay for the four-dollar map, my lowest denomination was a $10. The cashier didnŐt have the proper change, so she finally gave me 3 $2 rolls of nickels. So I walked around town with sagging rolls of nickels in my back pocket.

Travis and Hugo took us out of town to the Papallacta hot springs, which were situated alongside a lush river. The entrance fee was $6, which provided a perfect opportunity to get rid of my nickels. The cashier looked at them and laughed, but accepted the nickels without counting them.

The hot springs was a collection of spring feed pools on the grounds. We staked out one uncrowded pool and soaked for a while in the 100-degree water admiring the amount of green after yesterday's stark white glacier.

Scott scouted out a better pool complete with a very hot water fall and we purchased a six-pack to split while we soaked in the waters. Scott gave away one of the Nerf footballs he'd brought to a child in a pool nearby.

We had a late lunch, most of us trying the local trout fresh from the stream or the fish farm down the road. On the drive back to Quito we realized how sunburned we all had become, sitting in the hot springs on a cloudy day, but forgetting we were almost on the equator.

After our return to Quito we all walked around so more in a search for a poster of Cayambe, which we finally found at about the 8th place we checked. Afterwards, Charles, Scott and I went into Pool Six for some beer and a few games of pool. The place looked scary even without anyone else in there - the lighting and green painted brick walls looked like someone's basement attempt at a Halloween haunted house.

At dinner that night we watched a little of the Simpsons dubbed in Spanish before returning to the Hotel Alcala to repack our bags for another extended departure from Quito.