In Quito, we stayed at Hotel Café Cultura, a delightfully decorated hotel which used to be the French Embassy. We were thrilled that the decorations in Room 12 where we stayed were based on Botticelli's Birth of Venus. (It might not be entirely obvious why someone would be thrilled like that, but there was once a wonderful lady on Mercer Island, in Lake Washington, who collected parody images of the Birth of Venus, or at least politely accepted them when they were thrust upon her, and our devotion to her survived her interest in them, and ultimately her.) Here Rob's friends and relatives gather for the trip to the equator monument La Mitad Del Mundo.