Ancient Rocks and Food That Hops - Querétaro

With our bellies full of tacos and pastries from Mexico City (and maybe a few extra pastries in our backpacks…) we jumped on a ~3.5 hour bus to head to Santiago de Querétaro (more commonly known as Querétaro). After our bus adventure in Mexico City, we decided to ride in style with ETN, a double decker luxury-style bus for about $20 each. To our surprise, we even received a drink and snack prior to boarding. We literally put our feet up and enjoyed the scenery on our way to our next city in Mexico.

We spent 9 days in Querétaro, and to be honest it was a few days too many. I’ll highlight the parts we really enjoyed, but 3-4 days here would have been enough for us. We spent our first 4 nights in the DoubleTree hotel (for free of course!) just outside the city center. We took Uber into the center everyday, but the traffic was so awful that it would sometimes take 40 minutes to drive about 2 miles. Maybe we were being lazy, but it cost ~$1-2 to take Uber. During the second half of our time, we stayed in the city center at Hotel San Xavier. This was a fantastic location and had an amazing breakfast! It had a great pool, but it was too chilly outside for us to use it, so we used the rooftop jacuzzi instead. Here’s what we enjoyed in no particular order:

1. Museo de Arte de Queretaro: The building itself was what I loved the most. It was even free on Tuesday.

2. Museo de Calendarios: Also a beautiful building with courtyards that run throughout the center with a large garden area in the back where you can sit and have a drink.

3. Peña de Bernal: Overall, this was my favorite thing we did here. We jumped on a local bus and within 40 minutes or so we arrived at the giant monolith in San Sebastián Bernal. It's estimated to be about 8.7 million years old. We spent the afternoon hiking up as far as we could without climbing gear (several people pictured below scaling the rock - maybe someday...) and then enjoyed a refreshing drink and some lunch on our way down the hill.

4. El Cerrito Archeological Site: This was a neat 30 minute stop and a short Uber ride from the city center. It’s an archaeological zone, and unfortunately we weren’t allowed to climb it, or get too close. It was still worth the stop to walk around the grounds.

5. Aqueduct of Querétaro: We had a gorgeous view of the aqueduct at night, but of course our photos don’t do it justice. It has 74 enormous arches that can be seen from several places throughout the city (mostly during our Uber rides).



6. San Miguelito: This was a fun restaurant we went to a couple of times. We had some excellent margaritas and decided to try one of the many guacamoles. We quickly learned the reason this one was called the “Oaxaca”... Luckily, we weren't too surprised to see this topping after meeting a couple of guys from New York the night before who told us about this popular snack. 



After Ricardo had the first episode of the “Mexico Sickness,” we were more than ready to head to San Miguel de Allende. I tried telling him not to eat grasshoppers but he just wouldn’t listen. In reality, he got sick after eating at the “fanciest” restaurant we went to in Querétaro. Of course, this didn't deter us from eating new foods throughout our remaining time in Mexico...although it should have :)