Leon

We started out early in the morning to take the 'chicken' (local) bus to Leon for the day.  It was an extremely bumpy bus ride but the scenery was beautiful...green countryside and a volcanos in the distance.  It took 1 1/2 hours one way and the first 3/4 of the road was horrible with potholes and on and off a bumpy dirt road, then all of a sudden we came to the highway and the last portion of the way there was beautiful paved 2-lane highway.

When we arrived in Leon we were amazed at all the cars and people.  We were let off in the middle of a market and it was jammed with produce vendors and people selling just about anything.  We knew our destination was central park in Leon but we were quite far from there and we were not sure how to get there so we asked a couple of taxi drivers and they wanted 40 cordobas ($2.00) to take us there.  Well, being the frugal gringos that we are we thought that was too much money.  So we saw a young man driving a bicycle 'coche' (taxi) and he would only charge us 20 cordobas ($1.00) so we hopped on board his little coche and he rode us weaving in and out through all the people, cars and vendors.  It was lots of fun and so much more adventurous than a dull, boring taxi.  It took us over 25 minutes to get to central park and at times we felt a little guilty because he was pedaling so hard that he really got a good work-out.   

Main Cathedral in Leon

We arrived at central park and took photos of a large cathedral and then we decided to walk and look for other cathedrals in Leon.  Well, we had a map but we still got lost as we wandered around in circles for quite a while and finally we began to locate other old cathedrals as we  explored around the city.  After we had seen quite enough and were quite tired we trudged the long way back to the bus terminal.

There were sidewalks at times but they were so crowded with people selling their wares that we had to walk in the street most of the time.  The interesting thing we noticed was that everyone seemed to be selling something but no one seemed to be buying?

Upon arrival at the bus terminal, we now had to find the bus that would take us back to Los Cedros.  That was not an easy task because there were at least 20 buses to choose from so we saw one that said Managua and when I (Liz) went up to the driver to ask if this bus went by Los Cedros.... all I said was 'do you go by' and before I could say 'Los Cedros' he said "do you want to go to Los Cedros"...it was hilarious to us!   He must have recognized us because we are probably be the only two gringos that actually take the bus along that route.

After another extremely bumpy 1 1/2 hour bus ride on a very hard seat, we finally arrived at Los Cedros with very sore bottoms :)