While this trip was primarily concerned with baseball (driving to and attending games did indeed take up most of our time), we were still able to see some of the cities we visited. Since we’re both hungry beer nerds, we focused mainly on eating and drinking the best food and beer we could find. With the help of recommendations by local friends, I think we did a pretty good job of that.Â
I’ve been a big baseball fan my whole life, but as a kid that passion was generally spent during my little league games or on the hometown Red Sox. I became a true fan of the sport after graduating high school, when my father and I went on an 8-day, 7-stadium road trip. Ever since, I’ve wanted to visit all 30 stadiums.
Guatemala is now several months in the rearview mirror, which has given me plenty of time to reflect and reminisce. Our tour ended up being shortened by over seven months of cancer treatment to start and an early departure of ten weeks to accommodate Vietnamese language training and home leave. By the end, we spent only 14 of the 24 months we were originally assigned to the country physically in Guatemala. That left us with plenty of missed tourism opportunities, but we feel like we saw enough of the country to say that we got a full Guatemalan experience.Â
Guatemala has built up some renown for their celebrations leading up to Easter, so much so that UNESCO designated Guatemala’s Holy Week an Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity in 2021. For five straight weeks leading into Holy Sunday, you can find processions around the country. The most famous is during Semana Santa, when residents of Antigua build carpets made of dyed sawdust, flowers, scraps of paper, and other materials, called alfombras in Spanish.Â
The last trip we made during our time in Guatemala was to Petén, the largest and northernmost department in Guatemala that borders Mexico and Belize. Our original trip was supposed to be in early July, but that ended up being delayed until just days before our departure due to a tropical storm. We knew we were taking a chance by booking a trip during rainy season, but we weren’t about to leave Guatemala without seeing the famous Mayan ruins of Tikal.
You would be forgiven for thinking that Guatemala isn’t exactly a craft beer destination. I certainly didn’t expect much. After arriving, I did what I always do when I move to a new place: I worked my way through the local beer selection. I was pleasantly surprised by the quality of craft options. Even the national mass-produced lager was solid.Â
When we first received our assignment to Guatemala and started thinking about regional travel, Misha said to me that if we were going to visit Mexico, she didn’t want to go anywhere she’d already been. Well, much like James Taylor, I’d never really been but I sure wanted to go. We haven’t been able to take advantage of the regional travel as much as we originally thought due to Misha’s cancer treatment, but after traveling to Mexico City on my own in February, I had to go back. Misha had never been to Oaxaca, widely considered one of the premiere culinary destinations of the Western Hemisphere, so that’s how we spent our extended Memorial Day Weekend.Â
When Misha was provided the opportunity to go to Bogota for a four-day training on atrocity prevention, we jumped at the chance to bundle it with some tourist activity. We flew down on a Friday in April, and I returned on Monday. Misha stayed for her training, which included one big tourist attraction outside of the city that I missed out on. Bogota is the third largest city in South America by population, home to over 8 million people. It’s also very high up in the mountains of Colombia, with an altitude of over 8600 feet.Â
We’ve gone on a number of trips around Guatemala since our first visit to Lake Atitlan in December. Most of these were limited to extended weekends or day trips and included trips with family and friends alike. Some stops along the way were new to us, while we returned to many others. Here is a recap of our Guatemala 2024 tour to date.
In early December, Misha and I finally made our first visit to Lake Atitlan. It's one of the most popular tourist attractions in the country and routinely ranked among the world's most beautiful lakes. Lago de Atitlan is less than 50 miles from the capital as the crow flies but can take over 4 hours to reach by car due to a combination of traffic and winding, twisting country roads.  It sits in the shadow of three volcanoes and was formed by a supervolcanic eruption some 84,000 years ago.  Eleven little towns, each with their own distinct characteristics, dot the shores of the lake, three of which Misha and I visited on this trip.Â
Beer and Diplomacy 
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