E is for Excellent Vacation

We did have a very nice vacation. Sean has been posting some fun pictures from our trip. Now it's my turn! (This way you'll all know that Sean did actually bring along the family!) As Sean said, together we took about 700 pictures - I took about 1/3 of those, so Sean still wins as the obsessed photomaniac. It is probably a very dangerous thing that we both have cameras now. It would have been very annoying to anyone traveling with us - we stopped every 100 yards or so to take pictures! Our kids are going to have some very weird ideas about what it means to travel in a car...i.e. taking every side road just to see where it leads, stopping every other yard or so to take a picture, measuring distances not by miles but by how many great photo ops were found along the way, turning a 4 hour drive into an 8 hour drive every time, getting lost just for the heck of it.... But those are the things that make a vacation truly enjoyable for us, weird as it is. And, thankfully, our girls are very patient with their weird parents. Our little angels were AWESOME travelers.

Here we are in front of Cotopaxi Volcano in the National Park. It was so cool to see such a different landscape from the jungle that we live in. It was cold and windy and high enough above sea level that we were really feeling it in our lungs! (We're at about 11,000 or 12,000 feet here. Cotopaxi looms above us at an impressive 19,347 feet above sea level.)

We went for a fun little hike to some Inca ruins and Maddie was a trooper even though the wind nearly took her breath away!

These are the Inca Ruins. They were up on a high hill overlooking a large valley near Cotopaxi. We know nothing about when this was built or what purpose it served - there weren't any nifty little signs like we're used to at archaeological sites in the U.S. Still, it was fun to imagine what might have happened on that hill so long ago and who might have lived there...

Brooklyn enjoyed seeing lots of neat birds and ducks at the lake. She is definitely her parents' child and loves exploring new places with us.

While traveling, I got bored and creative, snapping this shot of Maddie in her car seat.

Juan Valdez lost his donkey and I found it...

This is Cuello de Luna, the hotel we stayed at near Cotopaxi Nat'l Park. It wasn't anything very fancy but it had a cozy feel with a fireplace in the room and some very friendly (too friendly?) St. Bernard dogs!

We have a ton of pictures of Cotopaxi from many different angles. It is such an awe-inspiring volcano. At every turn, we'd see it from a new perspective and be blown away all over again at God's awesome creation.

We spent a lot of time eating in restaurants! Here, Maddie and I wait for dinner at the restaurant at Termas de Papallacta, the hot springs resort we spent a couple of nights at.

Sean and the girls at Papallacta.

We spent a lot of time in the pools and just relaxing. Aren't these two so cute?!

Well, that is a short summary of our week of vacation. It's time to get back to the real world. Brooklyn will go back to school this week and I'll be helping out some with that. We have a prayer letter to work on this week plus the usual stuff that keeps our lives so busy. I praise God for such an excellent vacation and I also praise God for a full life - we were not even a tiny bit disappointed to return to our "routine" and life here in Shell, Ecuador.

*****
E is also for:

Ecord. My maiden name. Pronounced EEE- cord. Nobody ever got that right.

Elephant. I've ridden two. Once when the circus came to my hometown of Monte Vista, Colorado and once in Kathmandu, Nepal.

Enough for now. Time for bed. Goodnight!