One of the highlights of our stay was having breakfast each morning at Hotel Barcelona.  Shown here is Teresa and Nicole, who made certain everything about our stay was enjoyable:

This was our breakfast spread each morning.  The buffet consisted of pancakes with sugar cane syrup, fresh cheese, cantaloupe, watermelon, platanos (I still don’t know what they are, but they are good), bananas, pineapple, scrambled eggs, coffee, and fresh squeezed orange juice.  The food at Barcelona was great and no one ever suffered from “Montezuma’s Revenge.”

After breakfast at 7:00 am each morning, we proceed past the local church to the local market, where we bought bottled water, lunch for the day, and sardines, rice, and beans for the residents of each house we worked in.

At every project, the village provides us with a secure place to store our tools and supplies, which saves a whole lot of time.  Shown below is the “bodega”  (aka warehouse) where we loaded up for work each morning.  This hacienda belongs to Margarite, a very influential, and nice lady in Jayacayan, and has been in her family for 100+ years.  It is currently used as a community gathering spot and is part of her farming operation.

Here, you will see Margarite’s workers planting tomato seeds that will eventually be placed in the soil once they sprout.  A large part of our produce in the US comes from Honduras.

The man above was a produce buyer for Dole, that had just purchased 300,000 lbs of tomatoes for approximately 25 cents per pound.  Sounds like a lot of money, but it really isn’t when it has to feed such a large number of workers and their families.

Although Jayacayan is home to many less-fortunate people, there are also those that are better off.  By offering our services “for hire” to certain families, we were able to subsidize the cost for others.  We did not know of this detail when we met Mr. Martinez at our first stop, below.  He was extremely pissed off that he received pull string lights instead of wall switches.  It is a damn good thing that he didn’t understand English and we didn’t understand Spanish…although I have a feeling we were both saying the same thing!  (After learning that he paid for all of his work and supplies, we did go back and installed the switches and parted as friends forever.)

In Honduras, most of the small villages are located way off of main highways.  The roads to the villages are rough and primitive, and the trails to the homes are even rougher.  And you never know just what you will see.  Take a look:

The end of the road…. which fork do you take?   Neither is wide enough for the truck and our helper is points up the hill.  Turns out it was 1/4 mile walk up that damn hill to the house we needed to work on.  Seemed a lot further than that to me.

The cows have better road manners than many drivers.  Shown below is a corral where we saw a bull getting his underparts cut off.  Not a good day for him.

There is also wool in Honduras.

Rest Rooms are plentiful.  These little Toyota diesels are amazing in adverse conditions.  At $350/week they are a deal.

Each evening on the drive back, we saw some amazing sunsets.

In Part 3, we will take a look at the families we encountered over the week.  These people were so gracious and appreciative.  We were welcomed into their homes as complete strangers and departed as dear friends. 

Trey Lewis is a licensed Real Estate Broker in the State of Tennessee with Ole South Realty, 615.896.0019  direct 615.593.6340.  Specializing in new home sales in the Greater Nashville area to include Nashville, Murfreesboro, Smyrna, and Spring Hill, Tennessee