Way down south where the missionaries grow . . . .

On Monday, the 21st of November we took Anika to the airport so she could fly to the MTC in Sao Paulo Brazil.

Even though it was hard to say goodbye, we did it at least three times each and also several times all together. Lots and lots of goodbye hugs. Lots.

And then we watched Sister Songer enter the security line and we left. (The way you do that is the same way you jump off a cliff into cold water--just do it quickly before you can really think about it. Otherwise it gets too hard.)

We knew she wouldn't be taking off for a couple of hours after we left her and that it would be the middle of the night our time before she got to Brazil. Throughout the day we thought about her and where she was in her journey. Casey pulled up the flight map so we could see exactly where she was at that moment. It doesn't make you feel better when your daughter's airplane is suspended over the vast expanse of the ocean. Nor is the ground much better.

When I woke up around 5 a.m. (as I do) I wrote her a quick email from my phone to welcome her to Brazil. (They are 5 hours ahead of us there. (Only in our modern world can you welcome someone to someplace you aren't.))

Happily, they let her send an email the day she arrived so that we'd know she was safely there and when we would be able to hear from her next. Here is her letter:

Ola familia, Estou aqui! I´m here, I´m safe, I´m taking forever to write this email because the keyboards are different. 

First news: Other than this letter, you won´t hear from me until next Wednesday (not this Wednesday but NEXT Wednesday!!) 

The unexpected: (They always tell you to expect the unexpected, and my only question is--how?!) 

...dun

...dun

...dun

...dun

...okay, the news is: I am flying solo. No other sisters came down with me, so I´ll be companionless. There are other solo sisters, but they are farther ahead than I am, so I can´t join them. 

This last sentence I will keep the errorsÇ /today I saw my first cockroach/1 and they are even bigger than i thought don~t underestimate Brazil!

I love you lots and next Wednesday (not this Wednesday but next!!) I will send pictures. ]

Just me and the elders

Sister Songer

(sorry if I come across oddly, I´m tired. Thanks for your letter!)

We are so excited for her! We miss her! We can't wait to hear more! 

Queen of the Bee

Hale-lujah, Rosie got First Runner-Up (i.e. 2nd Place) in the Valley Elementary annual Thanksgiving Spelling Bee!

 We are pretty proud of our 4th grader for beating out all the sixth graders.

The first place winner was a boy from 5th grade and third place went to another 4th grade girl.

We watched Rosie go from pretty subdued during the whiteboard portion, to more and more excited with every successful round.

She had to stretch her neck up to speak into the microphone. 

She was so excited toward the end that she was high-fiving the girl next to her and talking to her. I caught her eye from the audience and gave her the "shhh" sign, but I couldn't blame her, really. I would have done the same thing at her age--I remember that fizzy nervous feeling of being on the spot in front of an audience! Makes me feel a little sick remembering . . . .

(Look how flushed she is!)

She told me she was going to win a turkey for us and she did. Me of little faith, I'd already bought one (but only because they take so long to thaw in the fridge.) We'll be eating hers come Christmas.

Cruise Day 6 and 7--The End

The last at sea day was just a chance to revisit the stuff we'd already done before--swimming/waterslides, ropes course, climbing wall, exercising, eating....

Anderson slept in till 11:00. Later he and Lissa did some stuff with the teen group. I walked around the "Waterfront" deck for the first time and saw a rainbow over the ocean while the rain spat sideways into my eyes. I also saw the library for the first time. Everyone else saw these that first day while Rosie was napping.

We did try to get our stuff partly packed because we knew we had to be off the ship pretty early the next morning.

Anderson was invited to the goodbye party on deck by that girl, Reagan. We only let him stay out until 11:00 p.m. and the deal was he couldn't wake up his sisters when he got back.

 It was a struggle to get out the door the next morning. All the passengers were having breakfast in the Buffet at the same time and it was so crowded. Then we hadn't heard which floor the exit was on (it changed according to the kind of dock) and got stuck in the elevator for a while as it went all the way up to 15 and then back down again.

Eventually, we got off with all our stuff. Then we went to church. We hung out in the ward building for a couple of hours before the English speaking branch started. Church was just like at home--the air conditioning was too high. The Relief Society President handed out blankets before her lesson.

Our trip home wasn't quite as murderous as the one out, but we were considerably more sunburned and not nearly as exited. We got to Salt Lake about midnight, waited forever for our one checked bag, drove home in a daze, and went straight to bed. Hooray, home sweet home!

Cruise Day 6--Cozumel

Today when we got off the ship we had to walk through both levels of an outdoor mall in order to exit the terminal. Then we got a taxi van to take us to a resort Casey had researched where they had a whole bunch of inflatables to climb around on. The taxi driver tried to sell us on some other place but we decided to stick with our plan.

 We thought the kids would have had enough snorkeling so we only brought three of our sets. They used them a lot and had to keep trading off. They saw a few new things today--a tulip shell, tiny crabs on the posts of the dock, and some kind of puffer fish squirting water at the sand to uncover food.

I made Rosalie wear her capris swimming today to cover her burn and I didn't feel like being in the sun today so I stayed in the shade under the trees. And reapplied 3 or 4 times, along with making everyone else do the same. And I got a light burn where my tee-shirt scooped down because I forgot I wasn't wearing my rashguard. This despite the cloud cover, and even rain, that we had about half of the day.

When we got back to the terminal/mall we went into a tourists' dream megastore and Rosalie bought two sailboat replicas, because everything was buy one get one free. Casey got a couple of tee shirts, and Anika got a couple of braided headbands because she admired the one I got in Belize, though they weren't quite the same style. 

As we approached the ship it finally rained for real. It took one minute to get totally soaked. It only rained for two or three minutes but it took the rest of our cruise to dry out all our stuff in our rooms. 

I wish I'd taken a picture of our cruise ship from the land. Those things are so enormous. Ours just loomed over the pier and you could see it from miles away along the flat coastline, especially in Costa Maya. The Norwegian Getaway is three times as large as the Titanic by weight. And 300 feet longer. And it still feels small in the middle of the ocean.

We finally ate at the Shanghai Noodle Bar after waiting for 45 minutes. The food was good but Rosalie wouldn't eat it. Meredith took her up to the Buffet for her daily cheeseburger and fries. Then we went to the comedy club. It was mostly clean but not that funny. The little girls and I left early. 

Cruise Day 5--Costa Maya

This morning we had breakfast at the Flamingo, another buffet style restaurant that is very small and all Latin America themed. Meredith left her room card there, but we didn't know that until later. This morning Meri didn't want to go on shore. We tried to get her to come but she just really didn't want to and even reminded us that she had never wanted to go on a cruise in the first place, but we had made her. In the end, after a frantic search for her room card and getting a new one issued from guest services just as Lissa found her old one, we left her on board with instructions to stay in her room or the library or the buffet for lunch. 

The pier is so long at Costa Maya that they have shuttles to take you from the ship to the shore. 

We didn't want to wait for one going or coming, so we walked. Then we had to get a taxi/open bus out to the beaches. We had planned on going to one that was closest to the good snorkeling, but a salesman for a different resort offered us access to kayaks, paddleboards, shade, etc. at such a good price that we went there instead. 

It was a fair swim to get out to the good snorkeling, but there was an old dock along the way where a log of big fish were hanging out.

I followed Rosalie out to the dock and we snorkeled for a little before heading back. The rocks were really close to the surface if you headed for the beach too soon and at one point I scolded Rosie for not paying attention to where she was swimming. She headed for shore so quickly that before I could stop her, she beached herself on shell encrusted pokey rocks. I couldn't swim to her and with flippers on I couldn't walk to her. She squatted on some rocks and glared at me while I stood forty feet away in eight inches of water and glared at her. For ten minutes. Then I calmed down enough to walk to her backwards. She showed me the urchins hiding in holes in the rock above the water line--the waves refilled them every few seconds. And I showed her there were hermit crabs everywhere. We carefully picked our way out to deeper water and went back to the beach.

And this is where my brain let us down big time. Rosalie wanted to go try out the kayaks, so I said we should reapply sunscreen first, but I only did our faces. What? And Rosalie had brought her short sleeve rashguard instead of her long sleeve one. 

So first we tried a paddle board, but it was taking on water, so we got a kayak and headed out. Ani paddled out with another Kayak and we tied them to the old dock. When we reached the others they excitedly showed us what we thought was a skate, but later learned was a yellow stingray. We also saw barracuda.

And Lissa saw a porcupine fish hiding under a rock and swam away yelling into her snorkel because she remembered that we'd said puffer fish were dangerous. ( They are, if you eat them.)

We had a great time. I really love snorkeling. I could do it all day. 

Casey and Anderson took the kayaks back and then Rosie and I headed back snorkeling. After reeling her in from heading out to sea for the fourth or fifth time I linked arms with her. We noticed little hollows in the sea grasses where there were collections of conch shells, mostly long dead. And we saw a sand dollar, also dead. I'd have taken it as a souvenir but for the sign in Roatan saying "Preserve our National Parks. Don't take our shells."

Relaxing in the shade. One problem with underwater cameras is you forget they might have water droplets on the lens afterwards.

It took us a while to rinse off all our gear in the low pressure shower. Rosalie headed down the row of vendors and bought a tiny stone toucan. Anderson bought a bracelet like he had at the two previous ports. We considered buying woven name bracelets simply because it's so rare to see "Anika" and "Clarissa" in personalized items. And then as we were finally ready to head back and the cooling effects of the water had evaporated, I realized I was burned. Badly. And so were Rosalie and Clarissa. Regret! Especially for Rosie, who had leg burns like Clarissa and me, but also arm burns. And I was going to be so careful! Bah.

When we got to the long pier Rosalie was discouraged, so Anderson offered her a piggy-back ride and ran her halfway down the pier before it got too jouncy for her. Then he held up a towel to shade her legs while she walked the rest of the way.

I had to take a cold shower this time. We used a lot of aloe vera gel but it was from last year and over the next few days it didn't seem to help me any. 

We went to another sit-down restaurant for dinner but left without dessert to go see "Million Dollar Quartet." It was awesome! But I was squirming the whole time from my super heated legs. We all enjoyed the show except for Rosalie, who opted to stay in the room and watch movies. 

Cruise Day 4--Belize

Belize was "un-Belize-able." I didn't come up with that, that's the slogan of the tourism industry in Belize.
Small boats tendered us from the cruise ship to the shore in Belize City. Then we took a bus inland for about an hour while our tour guide told us interesting things about the landscape we drove through.

 Gearing up for the zipline. Casey and I hadn't done zipline in Belize before, just Roatan. It turned out to be a really good course--jungly but with some long stretches.

Nesting hummingbird we saw on the way up to the first platform.

There were a lot of people to get through and the guys at each platform were chucking us down the line almost faster than the receiver could unhook the last one.

This was a really long rope bridge that leaned to one side as you walked across it.  The zipline just after we crossed over was my favorite. It was the longest (and highest) stretch of all and crossed over a river and then passed by an enormous tree that you could just touch the farthest branches of as you zipped by.

Then the bus took us a few miles down the road to the cave tubing site where we geared up for the water. Only after looking at this picture did we realize Lissa and Rosie should have traded life vests.

We had to walk for a couple of miles to get to the caves. On the way our guide told us about the local plants. 

Pineapple

Cave tubing here has increased in popularity since the time we came 12 years ago.

Our river guide, Barry, basically had to swim us through the caves by the strength of his arms. The current is gentle and there were so many other groups there that we were all bunched up inside. 

 

It kind of felt like an amusement park ride with how closely packed we were.

The view of "the sphinx" as daylight disappears behind you.

A break in the darkness about halfway through the cave. We all had headlamps, so we could see the features on the low ceiling. 

 Meri was the only one with a hole through the bottom of her tube.

Meri and Rosie got out and swam behind once we were out of the cave. Eventually everyone else took a swim, too. Except me--I felt so relaxed, I just wanted to stay where I was.

Normally they would have fed us lunch at tour headquarters, but half the bus (not our half) had to leave port an hour earlier than usual so they fed us on the bus. Yummy chicken and rice and beans. Even our picky eaters liked it.

(not one of our picky eaters)

And, of course, Rosalie bought something at the little flea market outside the cruise terminal--a conch shell. When we went through security the man checked it very carefully to make sure it was really dead. 

Back on board we tried to go to the Shanghai Noodle Bar, but it was so tiny that the wait was an hour. So we had dinner in the Buffet. Rosalie was thrilled to not have to wait for her burger and fries.