My Dad & Co. Came to Visit

The first weekend in April my Dad, Jama, Jordan, and Eden came to visit.  Although they would spend a week in Ecuador, they were only supposed to be with us 1.5 days.  Then a canceled flight dropped that down to just 24 measly hours.  But it was pretty jam-packed.

After arriving Saturday evening, we rushed the entire crew to their hotel then to our house, where we had an eight piece band and open back party bus (trolley?) coming to drive us around for an hour.  Of course the bus called to say it would be half hour late, but they would still give us the full time, but what was I going to do with the band that I had booked for the same hour?  Well, we opened up the garage and had the band play for 30 minutes while we (the family and the volunteers) danced around on the sidewalk.  I took no photos so had to steal some from the volunteers on facebook.

After a half hour the bus indeed did show up, so we let the band on, then we all climbed aboard.  We spent 30 minutes driving around the downtown of Cuenca, and enjoyed the ultra-loud band and the many many people laughing at/with us.  Probably the worst part was our ridiculous selves driving by where pre-Easter mass was just being let out…  We had to drop off the band, but went back out for another 15 minutes listening to my dad’s CD he made specially for the occasion.  It had two songs, Pumped Up Kicks by Foster the People (because my children love it and always danced to it at my dad’s) and Panic Switch by Silversun Pickups because my dad loves it and something about the irony of old Cuenca and blah blah blah.  I told my dad it must be nice going senile, because only crazy people want a party bus with a band.  He says it is nice indeed.  Eventually we got home and went to sleep as church started at 8am the morning.  We went to church and then got into a van and went to some waterfalls we intended to hike up.  There ended up being an excessive amount of water flow which cut our hike very short, but we had a good time getting soaked on a scary bridge below the waterfalls anyway.  I took no photos.  My dad has a couple perhaps.

After eating lunch we enjoyed the drive back to our house. Aaron put the kids down for a nap and I took the family to one of the orphanages to donate the awesome giant towel bibs they made for a service project before they came. We had a good time and then came home to eat Easter dinner. This included many fine Ecuadorian dishes, including Cuy (roasted guinea pig). If you haven’t eaten Cuy for Easter dinner, then you are not really missing out.  Eden was pretty grossed out, especially after I told her all about where different meats come from (hamburgers come from COWS?) but eventually came around from her newly declared vegetarian ways and tried a bite.

She didn’t like it.  But we gave her many points for trying it.  After dinner we had cake and the family went back to their hotel to sleep for their flight out the next day.  We loved having them here even if was for such a short time!