Garden City missionary digs

 This post may be a little boring for some of you but our family is always interested in what our living situation looks like.  So I will give you a tour of our Garden City Duplex before we move to Scott City in a couple of weeks.

We live about 10 minutes out of the city up on a little rise where a builder has developed about 20 duplexes and is very picky about who they rent to so it has been kept very nice.  The second garage door is our place 1244 Shannon Road, Garden City, Kansas 67846 (in case anyone wants to give the postman something to deliver to our very empty mailbox  :)

Missionary apartments don't need much in the way of furniture so this is the extent of ours in the living room.  Walls are so bare!  I miss the lovely artwork and pictures of the Savior we had in our Guatemalan temple apartment.  We also have two folding chairs and four dining room chairs if we have a Family Home Evening with our students.

We have two tables like this, one in the dining room and one in the extra bedroom which we use as a study room.  Two wooden dining room chairs in each room.  Functional, hard, and adequate.  I'm glad I stuck in that table runner from our China mission and wish I had bought some of the beautiful cloth in Guatemala.  

 This is our small but efficient kitchen.  You can see that the biggest challenge is so little counter space, so one of our first purchases was a stand for the microwave to be in the dining room to free up some counter space.

The laundry room is in the passage way from the garage to the kitchen and must include a place for the kitchen trash container as there is nowhere to put it in the kitchen.  We have a few other rooms like a small bathroom and a bedroom but they aren't anything unusual to take a picture of so I will just leave them to  your imagination.

We love to take our morning walks around the development and down the country roads.  It has been so rainy here lately that this is what we found one morning.  I thought it looked like a fairy ring.

Can't you just imagine elves cavorting around and on top of these cute things in the moonlight?

You will probably see lots of pictures of sunflowers as I love them so much.  This is just down the road apiece on the corner of Farmland Road and Shulman.  Aren't they gorgeous?

Adios Guatemala - Howdy Kansas

                        

We loved the opportunity to serve the Lord in the Quetzaltenango, Guatemala temple but unfortunately after four months we had to return to the US to get some badly needed medical care for Brannick.  These pictures above are our last day there in front of our beautiful temple saying goodbye to our temple president, President Galvez and his wife.  Also a sad farewell to our dear friends, Ken and Chrys Meadows, who were instrumental in our going to Quetzaltenango and were the ones we enjoyed so many adventures with.

On the day we left Quetzaltenango to drive to the capital, Guatemala City, the airport was closed because one of the volcanos had decided to get active.  This was taken on the way into the city.  Fortunately, the airport was open the next day when we flew out headed for the states.

It took us six months to get things straightened out with the doctors and to make sure everything was working all right. When we got the 'all clear' from the doctors, we requested  a reassignment to finish our mission and received a call to go to the Kansas Wichita Mission to teach religion classes to young single adults and college age kids.  We were delighted!

We left on Monday, August 3 to make the two day trip to Garden City, Kansas. Here is our 'Welcome to Kansas' sign.

This is one stop we made to wave goodbye to the mountains as we had heard we would no longer be seeing them on the flat plains.

And sure enough, here we see where the flat land meets the sky with no mountains in sight to hold it up!

These beautiful wild sunflowers are all along the roadsides and remind me so much of my childhood.  My mother would always put our sunflower bouquets we brought her in her prettiest vase.  These grew all along the lane in Lehi so we picked them for her often.
 

Traveling back from one of the small cities we will be teaching in, we came across fields of huge sunflowers so I couldn't resist a picture.

I thought Arizona held the award for the most beautiful sunsets and I would miss them but as we were returning from Dodge City last week, I snapped this one.  It was a beautiful sky for a long time.  We will miss some things from our home in the desert with mountains surrounding Tucson but we are finding lots of things to love here in Kansas.  So check back and you will find more as we learn about the culture in the Heartland. 

The Ancient Ruins of Tikal

If you haven't read our two previous posts about our January 2015 trip, you should do so.  We traveled first to Copan, Honduras, then to Rio Dulce, Guatemala.  Now I am ready to post the next leg of our trip, the towering ruins of Tikal.

On Friday, January 9th, we left Rio Dulce in the rain and traveled about four hours to Santa Elena, Guatemala.  The next morning we drove about another hour to get to the entrance of Tikal.

In the parking lot this cute little girl met us selling her corn husk dolls for such a cheap price (about a dollar each) we couldn't resist taking a picture with her and our purchases.

 Just as we started our walking tour we passed a small shop where we stopped to watch a woman using a back strap loom to weave beautiful table runners. Notice her little boy who just plays there quietly all day while she works.

 Chrys and I couldn't resist each buying one as they were so colorful and typical of Guatemala.  They are all the more special because we bought them from the lady who created them. This beautiful blue one is the one I finally chose with the Quetzal birds and other significant native designs.

Lest you think this was just a shopping trip, I will now go on to tell you about the sights in the temples of Tikal.  This Mayan city was one of the most extensive and densely populated and is also one of the oldest, having become populated in the 7th century BC.  Below you see the typical design of the temples here with the white apron molding and the crowning crest which like a bell tower on churches, guides the worshipers to the ceremonial center.

This one reminded us of the Grand Staircase Temple in Copan except this one did not have the elaborate story carvings found on that one.  It truly was as our guide told us, Copan is like Paris because of the fine carvings and Tikal is like New York because of the height of the temples.

There were some carvings but they were a bit more crude without the fine detail we had seen before in Copan.

One of the amazing things is that we could climb around on these tall temples and be up above the tree line.  This would not be possible on ruins in the states.

From up here we could see the top crests of four or five other temples poking up through the canopy.

This is the North Acropolis, the single most complete construction in terms of development and content, which has been excavated up to now in the Mayan region. Those little straw structures covered some carved stells that were weathering badly.

Besides the ancient ruins to see we enjoyed watching the antics of some monkeys high in the treetops.

It was rainy off and on all morning which made the clay-like soil very slick and slippery and there were tree roots always ready to trip us up.  We felt blessed that none of us fell down even though we slipped a few times.  The whole area was like a beautiful park and we enjoyed our explorations immensely.

As we were leaving the park, we came across this display of much more detailed corn husk dolls that were adorned with mushrooms, feathers, and tiny straw flowers for only Q10 each (about $1.25) so of course we had to end our day buying recuerdos.  I only bought one but wish now I had bought a whole bunch of them.  Aren't they adorable?

We thoroughly enjoyed our day tramping through the jungle exploring these ancient Mayan temples.  Not sure how they might connect with the Lamanites in the Book of Mormon but some of them were built around the same time.  We arrived walking about 9:00 and our feet finally gave out about 3:00, glad to head back to our hotel in Santa Elena.  We drove around and found a chapel to attend church in the next morning and then plan to head for Belieze.

Rio Dulce Guatemala

Continuing our January Adventures

We enjoyed a full morning in the ruins of Copan and then early afternoon we left and crossed the border back in to Guatemala heading for Rio Dulce (sweet river).  It took us about 4 hours before we got to the little town and crossed over the biggest bridge in Central America.  We had no reservations so we searched the town and didn't find anything promising.  Meadows knew of a resort called Mansion Rio Dulce that friends had stayed at and had given directions to.  It was way out of town on a horrible muddy road and just before we were ready to give up, we found it.  It was well worth the drive and we wished we had more than one night to stay there.  Wish I had some pictures of it cause it was lovely.

 We had breakfast 'a fresco' under thatched roof by the pools.   As we checked out and were driving away down the long driveway to the road, we had a tender mercy.  The security guard at the gate told us we had left a credit card at the desk.  Brannick realized it was his and as we turned around to go retrieve it, we saw an employee running to try to catch us with the card in his hand.  We had no phones on us nor left any address so it would have been impossible to get it back after we left.

We contracted a boat and took off down the river. The river begins at Lake Izabal and is so wide for such a long ways you don't realize you are in a river.

It was so beautiful, peaceful and calm on the river that we just relaxed and enjoyed the trip.

We saw many beautiful sights along the river including this patch of water lilies.

 
We saw lots of these mangroves with their spiny roots going down into the water.  A little creepy!

 This was a large island in the middle of the river where various birds hang out.  Can you spot the beautiful long legged white birds up in the trees?

We saw evidence of people used the river for all sorts of things like this group of ladies doing their laundry.

This family home was quite a ways down the river and the only access they had to shopping or anything like that is by canoe or boat.  We wondered about school for these kids.

This business woman conducted her business on the river by bringing her wares to sell from her canoe right up to the  tourist boats going up and down the river.  

We made a rest stop here at Agua Caliente (hot springs).  I think this was about half way.

We were offered fresh blue crabs which we declined and a trip up the hill to this rustic bathroom which we did appreciate.

The hot springs was actually very hot water that flowed underground from a volcano quite a ways away.  It was really hot right near these rocks and then cooled off as it mixed with the river water.  Very interesting.  We could not even see the volcano.

The river flows into a long narrow lake named El Golfete  and we went through a gorge with steep tree covered walls on either side.

As we neared the mouth of the river we began to see signs of civilization again but this flock of pelicans caught our attention as we came into the port of Livingston where the river emptied into the Caribbean. 

Livingston is part of Guatemala but it sure seemed like we had dropped into Jamica with black ladies in bright colors and tall young men sporting dreadlocks.  What really threw me was that they were all speaking Spanish!

We were admiring this tall skinny dude's long dreadlocks when he decided to share them with Ken, who doesn't have much hair.  He was talking Caribbean English and was part of the colorful street scenes there in Livingston.

We left Livingston and just flew fast back up the river for a short tour of the fort.  At the entrance to Rio Dolce there is a small Spanish colonial fort, the Castillo de San Felipe de Lara, built to stop pirates entering the lake from the Caribbean when this part of Central America was an important shipping staging point.

It started to sprinkle on us as we finished so we fixed and ate our peanut butter sandwiches  in the car and headed north to Tikal, our next adventure.

Exploring Copan, Honduras

Since our temple was closed in January for two weeks and we needed to be out of our apartment for the thorough cleaning of the annex, we decided to go traveling with Ken and Chrys Meadows.  Their kids, the Bradys had been there over Christmas, so we didn't have much time to plan our trip other than the main places we wanted to visit.  We decided that since we didn't know how long we wanted to stay at each of our planned destinations, we would just get our first night's reservations and trust that we could wing it for the rest.

We bought peanut butter, bread, and some snacks and started off on our way on Wednesday, Jan. 7 at 7:00 am.  We crossed the border of Honduras late in the afternoon and then it took us only about 10 minutes to get to Copan which was a quaint little town with narrow cobblestone streets going up and down the hills.

After traveling all day we were glad to get out of the car and walk those streets.  We found our hotel and were delighted that it was even lovelier than described on the internet.

We walked to El Bosque (the forest) which was recommended by our hotel.  This was the meal they brought us to share.  Wow!  What a lot of delicious food!  It was the best beef we had tasted since leaving the states.

This is the patio of our hotel where the next morning they served us breakfast on little tables set up here.  It was lovely with the sound of the birds in the trees and the water in the fountain.

.

We walked to the ruins and right away a guide "Tony" attached himself to us.  He was 77 years old and had been a guide there for 40 years.  We were really glad we did as we learned so much more than we would have on our own just walking around.

We learned from Tony that these magnificent Mayan ruins cover a time period from 1000 BC to 8 or 900 AD so there very well could have been some Book of Mormon connections here.  He was actually familiar with the Book of Mormon and had read it.












The carving on the stelas here was magnificent!  They were carvings to honor their rulers and were very detailed all the way round on four sides.
Both of these stelas are of Governor 18 rabbit and there are 6 stela images of him here all intricately carved like these.

Between the four of us adventurers you can see the Mayan ball field like the one we saw in Zaculeu.  They are found in most Mayan ruin sites and are quite well preserved.  We were told that on special occasions they have a ceremonial ball game.  I hope they don't kill the losers as they did anciently!

This old man's head sculpture is one of the most famous and was featured in National Geographic.  This is the monumental head of a bacab, or elder holding the sky.  There were two enormous sculptures at the top of the Great Stairway of one of the temples.  Apparently the body was fractured so badly it could not be reconstructed.  I can't imagine how colossal it would have been!

This is the Hieroglyphic Stairway and is the largest text in the Maya world.  Governor 15 Humo Caracol had this stairway made in the year 753 AD which tells a history of this people.  It was discovered in 1886 and as they tried to reconstruct it they moved some of the steps not realizing they were a text.  The stairway consists of 1250 rock blocks with hieroglyphic inscriptions which have not all been translated yet.

This is what they think it would have looked like in its original form.  Mighty impressive!

This altar with its detailed carvings represents the images of the 16 governors of the Copan dynasty.

There were tunnels under the temples dug by the archaeologists to explore that we could have gone in but since we could see this complete replica in the museum, we opted not to knowing how much Brannick likes tight  confined spaces.

This is a replica in the museum of the Rosalila Temple dated 571 AD  which is found buried under another temple because it is so sacred.  According to archaeologists it represents a mountain and the God of the Sun. The original actually has these bright colors on it.  They have discovered two more large temples buried underneath the Rosalila Temple which are not accessible to the public yet.

Our guide Tony compared Copan to Paris and Tikal to New York City.  The beauty of Copan was in the detailed carving of stelas and small temples but they did not have much height to them as we found in Tikal.




We also enjoyed the beauty of the plants and birds as we spent the morning exploring these amazing ruins.

To the left you see a cacao tree from which our chocolate is made.
The beautiful parrot is one of the many flying around in the treetops among these ancient Maya ruins.

We were so glad that we were able to spend the day with friends and see the sights that we would probably never have been able to see had we not come to serve in Guatemala.