a vacation from our vacation

This will be probably be my last post before Christmas, so Merry Christmas everyone! We hope to be able to phone some of you during the holidays. Liam is done school Wednesday afternoon and we have about 17 days before we have to be back for him to start again in January. So this is our planned itinerary: take the bus to Guaymas, then the ferry from Guaymas over to Santa Rosalia in southern Baja California. We will probably spend Christmas day there. Then we will take the bus south, stopping and spending a few days at various towns along the way, ending up in La Paz. We will then take the ferry from La Paz to Mazatlan, where we will spend a few days or weeks or months...well, maybe not months. From Mazatlan we will go up to Los Mochis where we will catch a train that will take us past the Barranca del Cobre (Copper Canyon) to Creel. At Creel we will catch a local bus (a 5 hour trip) that will take us into the bottom of the canyons to a tropical town called Batopilas. There we will spend the rest of our days until our return home to Dublan.

So that is our tentative plan.

And here are some random pictures for your viewing pleasure:

1. Ila, Liam, and Rus were walking past the church by the school yesterday and noticed this little yellow bird flying around inside the hallways. They found an open door, Rus easily caught it because it was so exhausted, and they let it go outside. You can see the little bird in Rus' hand.

2. A beautiful house that is now the headquarters of the Diario (a newspaper).

3. A nativity scene in front of someone's house that is missing the baby Jesus. For a long time we thought it was so sad that someone would steal it and then that they never replaced it with a new one. Then we were told that it is a tradition for a lot of people to not put the baby Jesus out until Christmas.

4. A crazy scary huge old rickety slide in the backyard of a friend's house. This father of the family who has it now used to slide down it on wax paper when he was a kid and would fly off the middle hump. Yikes. It's scary enough without the wax paper. Liam loved it though. We took some vidoes of him.

5. Rus and Mei. Weeeeee!