Old Home Week

Let me start out this post by saying I didn't make it to about 1/3 of the activities planned. My sister Kira was in town, and she is just BRUTAL with the fun schedule! Hahaha. I did my best. We had Kira, Meesha, and Deja in town, and of course my brother Gavin and his family came to play most days, which was heroic of them to drive down from Woods Cross each time. My Aunt Dawn and Uncle Charlie, who moved here recently were also players --with my parents. I love how so many of my family members are moving close by!

I got into town from Mexico late late Friday night, and spent Saturday trying to pull ourselves together. Sunday the schedule started with a vengeance. We went to church of course, then drove up to temple square in Salt Lake. 

We played around up there for a while, and then Meesha and I rushed back to cook a big carne asada meal for everyone. Scott did the grilling, but we had a big Mexican vegetable stir fry, seasoned black beans, chicken, and all of the burrito fixings you could imagine. Everyone hung out at my house until almost 10:00. We didn't realize we hadn't written our letters to Tia until we were lying in bed. I felt just sick thinking of her going to the little internet cafe and seeing no letters for her, so I set my alarm extra early the next day and got up to write first thing. 

After recovering from the early morning wake up and a Y-mountain hike workout, I took the boys to the Grotto off the Nebo loop. This is the shortest hike imaginable, but it has a cool waterfall at the end. 

We stopped at some of Payson's little shops to look around, and even caught a group of Dungeons and Dragons players in the middle of a game in a back room of the game shop. I felt like I had seen dinosaurs. I didn't know people still played that!

That night was our Hansen family reunion at Bartholemew park. Just a few weeks ago, Springville decided to charge for parking at this reservoir. We were a little bugged since it went into effect AFTER we had booked it. Not cool Springville. On the plus side, the kids had a blast in the water. We had family bring a giant paddle board, and a floating island mat thing, and some little rafts. 

We ate and played and had a great time. 

The next day, we headed over to the BYU art museum. There were two great exhibits there, along with the resident collections --which are great in their own right. Heck --I think there were two other temporary ones too that I missed. Anyway I stayed downstairs looking at 19th century photographs until I thoroughly bugged my family --most of which were upstairs. I realized though that I needed to get glasses from this experience. I couldn't see the details of those pictures like I wanted to. Great. Glasses. 

That night the siblings all went out for dinner at Maria Bonita's in Orem. Oh my goodness this was great food and great service! See the pineapple coconut drink above? It really was enough for three people. I got the molcahete to share with Jeff. Wow. grilled fresh nopales, spring onions, shrimp, beef, chicken.... it went on and on.

The next day we took my mom out for her birthday at Art City trolley. Can you see a theme here of eating too much? Yeah me too. Everyone went to Provo rec center that afternoon, but I just dropped Ari off and hurried home to get in a quick bike ride. Kai was pooping out on this one too. That night we went to my Aunt Dawn's house for another dinner. Many of us had never seen her new house so that was fun. 

The next day we went up to Tibble Fork, but Ari and Jeff had already left for ward youth conference in St. George. Me and Kai went though and we had a good time. My sister had rented a two person kayak that we paddled around the lake, and there was a rope swing into the water. 

I walked around the lake to the far side, and it was lined with big mature pines. my favorite. It smelled so good over there! There was also a little chipmunk on the side of the trail that must have been fed before by a number of people. He came right to my feet and looked up at me expecting food I guess, and then when I didn't oblige, he scurried up a tree right next to me until he was about level with my face and turned his head around to look at me. That actually made me a little nervous...

 That night we went to the Springville world folk fest. This is a neat event that Springville has hosted for 30 years or more. Dance teams from around the world travel to dance here in 3-4 performances at the Arts park. 

 I loved the casual atmosphere being outside brought to the event. The kids could play around without really bugging anyone. We could talk and chat about the performances too --which I did a ton of. I am a big talker in movies too. You probably don't want to sit next to me in a movie theater. 

This was my favorite group --which happened to be Native American dancers. The hoop dancing was just spectacular. 

Friday was moving day for Meesh. They were able to housesit for us while we were in Mexico, and stuck around this last week while we played, but their closing was on Friday, and they were able to move in right away. This was a big job and it isn't finished yet, but we got the kitchen functional and beds made at least. I slept on her couch (ironic change of places for us!) because we had another event up in Woods Cross the next day.

Bubby's baptism! This was such a nice event. Everyone came for this, even my Sister in law's family came from Arizona.However I was the only one from my family. Jeff and Ari were still at youth conference, and Kai was on a scout campout. 

We ate (again! oh my goodness I overate this week!) and talked and hung out at my brother's house, until I decided I had better hurry home to get things in order a bit after our week of playing. 

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Paddleboarding to Los Arcos

Thusrday morning Jeff and I wanted to take the kids up to zipline at El Eden, but they refused to hike up there to do it. Well, forget it we said. We went down to the cove to get a paddle-boarding lesson. I was really nervous about it. My kids had tried it in San Diego and kept falling off --making it look really hard! It wasn't difficult at all. I didn't fall off even once. We had a good teacher, and ten foot boards which I hear are a little easier to balance. We decided that for the price we were paying we weren't going to try to talk the kids into it. We just did a thing for us :) 

After the lesson on Thursday, we got up at 5:00 am on Friday our last day to do a dawn tour (with our instructor) of Los Arcos --islands just about a mile from the cove entrance. It was supposed to be great snorkeling there too, so our guide took our snorkel stuff on his board for us. He also took all of these pictures. Some of them are just fantastic! I highly recommend using him: Paddle Zone if you are in Mismaloya --or if you decide you want to see Los Arcos. His name is Santiago.

 These are the arches that Los Arcos is named after. There are 5 islands, and I think 3 have arches.

 Bats in here!

 The water was just crystal. So clear. We saw these little bio-luminescent algae critters in the water. They were big for plankton --like half a grain of rice --and bright blue! They flashed on and off. We were enchanted.

 We were there in time for the sunrise, and rested a bit.

 Our guide.

 We snorkeled for a while, and were really impressed with the number and variety of fish we saw. We also saw sea turtles from our boards and when we were in the water. This spot is worth an expedition to get to. I am biased and think we had the best way to get there. I felt sorry for the big boats crowded full of people disembarking just as we were ready to leave. 

 It was a great finale to a great vacation.

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Back to Manos de Amor orphanage --and movies!

 Wednesday was a crazy full day. The Manos de Amor place hadn’t had a computer teacher for a while, so I asked if they had internet, and when they said yes, thought we might show them Khan Academy and their computer courses. This way they could teach themselves. Imagine if all these kids started doing the hour of code challenge? Now that the internet is accessible in so many places around the world, it can be such a powerful tool for education, and pulling people out of cycles of poverty. Khan academy being free, and so comprehensive is an especially valuable tool. You could seriously teach yourself electrical engineering or linear algebra or yes, java script or C++. Can you imagine how that could change someone’s employment prospects? I was hoping to help. As with all grandiose dreams, the nitty gritty is sometimes less glorious.

Our internet has been next to nonexistent this week, so Jeff was going in to work at the real estate office of our condo manager. So nice of her to let him use their office. It has been a crucial week for his company, as thoroughly inconvenient as that is for us. Jeff drove us into Puerto Vallarta, and we took a bus the rest of the way to Bucerias. That went without a hitch. We then walked the kilometer or so to the orphanage from the bus stop, only getting lost once. Sigh.

I showed up and the computers in their little room were literally all in pieces. The cables were tangled, processors piled in stacks, and everything was very dusty. I am not a hardware girl either. I don’t know what things are sometimes. I only recognized one PC to start with, the others I thought might be game consoles? Routers? I figured it out eventually, and got four computers completed and online ready to go. I was filthy though by the end!

The director came in and talked with me a bit, and we decided it would make the most sense for her to understand how to use the site, and then she could share with the kids. We had one little girl come in for a minute while we were talking, and she ran over and started pushing buttons as fast as she could before I could get to her. There didn’t seem to be a lot of experience there with computer etiquette! She was little though  .

The keyboards are re-keyed to make them work with Spanish, and it took us forever to figure out how to get her logged on. For example, the @ symbol? Not where it says it is on the keyboard. You have to just keep guessing with different keys until it shows up. One more thing that will be a problem with programming. The / symbol too –not where it should be. Neither is the _ symbol. Anyway, my glorious dreams of creating orphan programmers may have been a little ambitious haha. But once you figure out where everything is, you are probably fine, it {could} work.

We were also thinking math, science, etc. If the schools here don’t offer advanced math, or if the director and her helpers can’t help very knowledgeably with homework (I know I have gotten stuck trying to help Ari myself), this can help everybody. The director seemed really interested in this. The whole site is in Spanish down here, and the videos are in Spanish and everything. I was really impressed.  

 Kai was able to share his DS with the boys --who loved it.

 Ari and Kai were going to teach the kids about the website, since they use it every day this summer, and all the time during the school year, but they ended up playing with the kids –Kai sharing his DS, and Ari playing ball in the yard. 

 Ari again was all about the soccer.

 I had a little peluquera (hairdresser) there for me.

 We walked back to the bus stop, and I got a text from Jeff saying he was able to figure out a huge problem at work, and was able to meet us. The kids and I found some late lunch, and waited for him. This reminded me so much of the mission! We are walking along dusty streets with our backpacks, looking for a little almacen to get a drink or a snack, trying to meet a bus, or find a member’s house. Good practice for my kids I guess!

 Our friends told us that all the theaters had bargain days on Wednesdays, and the tickets were only 30 pesos or so. This is around two bucks. Seriously. First run movie theaters (I think? I am not up on movies, but they all seemed pretty new to me), movies are in English if you pick those showings, (with Spanish subtitles). Getting us all in, and getting a big tub of popcorn to share put us back like $11.00 total. We saw the new spiderman!

This whole mall was lush. Everything looked just like the states to me, if not nicer. I guess it is super close to where the cruise ships dock so…  

 We headed towards the south end of town, and stopped for dinner in this little place in the hotel zone that looked liked nothing much. It was called Blake’s sport bar. We sat down, and while we were waiting to order, I noticed seven stickers in the door from Tripadvisor. This place had been talked about! We lucked out. We all loved our food. I got a chicken parmesan, subbing out the pasta for what they said would be a salad of baby lettuces. I didn’t have much hope for that part being good, but I needed vegetables badly at this point. The chicken was delicious, but the salad was perfectly crisp lettuces, with a housemade orange dressing that I could have licked the plate for. The garlic bread on the side was made with fresh garlic. Jeff got another kind of salad that I tasted and was delicious, and we all tried Kai’s nachos, with a guacamole that was housemade with fresh lime. Oh my goodness me. Ari got an Italian club sandwich that she ate every bite of, even when she couldn’t eat her fries she was so full. When a kid leaves fries for a sandwich, the sandwich is probably good. 

We drove home full and happy, watching the sunset through the trees most of the way.

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Chill Tuesday --catching up!

With spotty internet the last week in Mexico, I didn't get the last few posts up on the blog. I am going to go ahead and post them all now, but feel free to pick and choose what you read! This last week was a solid activity time for me with three out of town sisters all here to play, so this is my first chance. Whew!

We had a nice chill day on Tuesday. I cajoled the kids down to the beach, but the water was kind of cloudy for snorkeling near the shore. I wanted to go out to our spot by iguana point, but the kids weren’t into it, so Kai and I mostly floated around in the cove talking, and Ari read a book on shore most of the time.I was surprised by this guy a few times. He has no fear of people, and will eat from your hand if you let him. I must have seen half a dozen people take his picture over the course of the afternoon. We see him every day we go down to the cove.

 Kai and I were finally getting done, having applied sunscreen a few times by then, when Ari decided to get in. She swam around and played for an hour or so. I was glad she got in!

Kai tried making some drip castles for a while, and we headed home.

I hadn’t made it on my hike that morning, having slept in after waking in the middle of the night for a few hours (I don’t know what THAT was about), so I headed up in the evening. That place was transformed! Both of the little restaurants on the river were filled with people eating, and kids playing in the water pools and cataracts. The restaurants and people just at the river were playing classic Mexican Campesino music. It made me think of the old fashioned movies made in the U.S. portraying Mexican fiestas. I imagined I was hiking through a huge party, and it put a smile on my face.

  

 I was tempted to stop, but I was a good girl and finished my hike.

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