Prelude to a bad vacation

Mérida didn’t want us to leave last Sunday. We tried to go up the teleférico to hike to Los Nevados. We didn’t even need to go to the last stop on Pico Espejo, which has been closed for months; no, we just needed to go to the second-to-last stop, Loma Redonda. But Mérida wouldn’t budge. It was closed for three days: Friday, Saturday and Sunday. It doesn’t run Monday or Tuesday. So, we were stuck.
Then Brooke had a great idea: screw the mountains and the working vacation—let’s go to the beach, instead. Excellent idea. All we needed to do was head to the bus terminal and buy two overnight bus tickets to Valencia. Two quick bus trips and we’d be there; we’d purchase the tickets and we’d be back within an hour. That is, if there were no such thing as Carnaval. Or the parade that happens a week before Carnaval starts.
Of course, this parade runs on Avenida Las Américas, right where the bus terminal is located. No buses are passing through. So we decide to walk for about 40 minutes in some serious heat to get there. But really, no big deal.
And the parade was great. People everywhere, selling everything from cold Polar to ice cream to shish kebobs to water balloons (a Carnaval tradition). We watch the parade for a while, with its line of scantily clad 13-year-old girls dancing like their 18-year-old sisters, its group of black-faced transvestites, its drum corps and its salsa bands, its old cars and its beauty queens. There was even a vulture with a trainer; at one point, the trainer, wearing a big piece of material on his arm to protect him from the vulture’s talons, put the vulture on its cage and backed off, as if to have the vulture fly to him, only to have a drunk Venezuelan come up and distract the bird with his half-full bottle of Regional Light beer. Eventually the drunk was shooed away, and the vulture’s flight completed, but still, you’ve gotta love it.
Anyway, we eventually crossed through the parade and got our tickets. Getting back, well, that was a whole lot more walking, and one hell of a bus ride. Think of it this way: if the bus’ limit was 50 people, there were about 120 sitting, standing, leaning, floating, scratching, dragging, whatever. They did everything but bungee-cord people to the wheel wells and tie us to the roof. But we got home, three hours later. The trip that would follow that night, and the disappointment of last week, well, that’s another story.