A Quick Jamaica Account

Hey everyone,
I just got back from a missions trip to Jamaica yesterday. It was an experience that I am never going to forget. My relationship with Jesus Christ has exponentially grown stronger. I'm sorry that I can't write much, but I only have today because I leave for Italy very early tomorrow morning. I will write about that and more about this when I get back.

Here is a picture of my team and me.

YOSEMITE

Over spring break, I went up to Northern California. During that time I went to Yosemite. Although Yosemite might not be the most exotic of places, it was still really cool and beautiful. The mountains were huge. I was awestruck and I felt so small when I looked up at them. Especially half dome; it was so tall and I felt so useless looking up at it. 

The waterfalls are really cool too. There were several different ones. Some were really small, and others were huge. Yosemite Falls was either the biggest or one of them. It had three parts to it, the upper, the middle and the lower.

The biggest one was the upper, the smallest one was the middle, and the medium-sized one was the lower. The nature there was one of the things that makes you say, "how in the world did God make all of this in just anew days?"

We went on a couple little hikes and we took a bus tour around the park. Our guide was great. He knew what he was talking about and used what he knew to make the tour more interesting. 

The lodge we stayed at was called Yosemite Lodge. It was a pretty big place. They even had a place where you could rent bikes. I rented a bike and rode it around for a while we went to go watch people rock climb up the cliffs. While I was riding my bike it started to snow. That was the first time I was ever in a place where it was snowing for more than an hour. It didn't stay on the ground though, the weather was not cold enough for that.

One of the nights, we went out to dinner at the Ahwanee Hotel. The food was really good and the view was amazing, especially since it was snowing. We wanted to stay there but it cost too much so we didn't. The hotel itself is like a hundred years old.

Here are some of the pictures we took while we were there.

 Thats it for now. I will be posting later this month or early in the next.

The Egyptian Way!!!

Over winter break I went to a place where people don't normally go for an everyday vacation. I went to Egypt and Jordan. We stayed there for two weeks and even stayed for Christmas. It was kind of different but it was still really cool to do.

     So the Places we went were: Cairo, Abu Simbel, Aswan, A Cruise on the Nile, where we stopped at several places along the way; and Luxor, which had a lot of places to go to also. Today I am going to talk about Cairo.

 YYYYYYYYEEEEEEEEAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!

     Cairo, in case you didn't know is the Capitol of Egypt. It is rather large, but it is not like the big cities we have in the U.S. One of the coolest and most interesting things about Cairo is that the traffic is so crazy and the pedestrians just walk right through like there is nothing to it. But of course the coolest part of Cairo is Giza. Where's that? That is where the Pyramids are. The biggest things in the whole world in the Ancient Days, the things that were so incredibly built that people thought aliens came down and built them, the massive structures that made scientists believe that maybe the Egyptians had technology almost as advanced as ours... Yes those Pyramids!!!! They are one of the coolest things you will ever see in your life. And they are one of the few remaining ancient wonders of the world. I really thought they were cool.  We got to ride a camel by the pyramids too. My camels name was Charlie. He was a cool camel.

He liked too eat out of my hand. By the way this was the other camel named charlie, it wasnt my camel this was my camel.

 Also in Cairo, actually right outside of Cairo, there was the Step Pyramid, the very first pyramid built by the father of the one who built the Great Pyramid. It was really cool, but not even close to as big as the other 3 pyramids were. Over by that pyramid I got to ride my horse, Amira; which means princess.

Isn't she a peerrrrrrtyyyy one?

 Oh how could I forget to mention the most important part of our trip to Cairo... Our guide!!! Ahmed!!!!!!!

Best Guide Ever!!!!

We also went to the Museum in Cairo. The coolest thing there was that it had a whole section on King Tutankhamen. Way cool!!!

The museum is in Tahrir Square, which is where all of the protests have been and it is also where the revolution started.

This is a burned out government building right next to the museum. 

Although there had been problems in Cairo, we felt completely safe and we had no problems with protestors or anything like that.

See ya'll later when I talk about the rest of my Egyptrip.

"Amusement Rides" in Egypt and Jordan

This year we had an unusual Christmas vacation. We went to Egypt and Jordan. It was really cool and it was a very different experience. I got to see a lot of the things I studied in the 6th grade and it just so happened that Egypt was my favorite part of that class.

Along with the interesting things, there were some interesting "amusement rides."

The amusement rides were Horses, Donkeys, and Camels. Throughout the trip I rode 3 horses, a camel, and a donkey. I got to try all of them and each one was different.

This was in the wide open desert where the pyramids are.  Psych! They are in Cairo. We saw the camels while we were at the pyramids and decided to ride them. Gramma's camel was Moses; mine was Charlie and papa's was Whiskey.

This was at the Step Pyramid. The horses name was Amira which means Princess.

This was Hoda. The horse I had in the Nubian village across from Luxor. I rode this horse while papa and gramma went to the Luxor Museum.

This was the horse that I had in Petra. Gramma fell off her horse here and it looked really funny. I don't remember this horses name. We rode the horses to the Sig.

This was the majestic donkey known as Aususs, which was the father of the mules that my Grandparents and our guide rode. We rode them to the Bedouin village out in the middle of the desert.

I will be writing more about Egypt in the coming weeks. And that's a PROMISE!!!!1

Spring break

For spring break this year I went up to Monterrey for a couple of days. It was really nice there, except for a day with rain and wind. We were originally going to leave on Monday, but we didn't want to have to go through an eight hour drive all in one day; so we left on Sunday instead. On our way, we stopped in LA for one night. When we got to Monterrey, we checked in, unpacked, and went out to go see the Wharf and what there was to do. When we got there, we went to go into one of the buildings, but it was closed because of budget cuts. We went a little bit farther to go into a different building but it was only open on the weekend. So all the interesting stuff was closed. We went down to some of the shops there and looked around a little bit, but there was not much there. We heard some sea lions so we went over to watch them. They were funny and cute to watch. Later we had dinner at a sea food place.

The next day, we went to the aquarium and saw otters, some fish, jellys, and some really cool sea horses.

 Sea otter

 Jellyfish

 ????fish

 fishes

 penguin

 seahorse

The next day we went to Carmel and had dinner with some friends. Then the day after that, we started the drive home but stopped in Santa Barbara for a day and went around there for a while looking at stuff. Then we finally got home the next day.
bye

Amboseli day 1

We drove to Nairobi to an air strip and took a plane that only took four people. The ride was very bumpy because the plane was so small.

The view was amazing, I could see some animals from where we were in the plane. A funny thing is that the bumps were so big, that I thought we were going to fall all the way sometimes, but we didn't.

We landed in the middle of nowhere on a dirt air strip with someone waiting to pick us up. His name was David and he had some drinks and snacks with him for us to have.

I took this. Scherzo.

We drove to the lodge, on the way seeing some Maasai Giraffes.

Notice how the pattern is different than the Reticulated one in Samburu

We also saw some Ostriches. When we got to the lodge, they had warm towels to wash our faces off with and they had some watermelon juice for us to drink. The first night we stayed in a cabin, even thought we were supposed to have a tent which we ended up getting the next day anyway. It was very nice, the whole thing was like it was made by hand, or most of it anyway.

We had gotten there early so we went to the Maasai village near by, which we were going to do the next day. We went with a nice young women named Kimberly, who was from Island of Jersey. She works with the local people around the lodge.

We got there and we were greeted by the Chief, who was very young, because he was voted by his village to be the Chief.

The people greeted us with a dance and then showed us the houses, or huts, that the people lived in, then they showed us how they made fire, and then finally we went to look at some of the jewelry made by the women. We got some things as presents for some friends and I got a bracelet.

After that we went back to the lodge and relaxed for the rest of the day.
I will not be talking about Kenya on my next entry, instead, I will talk about my week in Big Bear Mountain.
bye

The Maasai Mara Part 1

To get to the Maasai Mara, we needed to go to an air strip in a town near Samburu. The plane was not very big but we went in a smaller one to Amboseli. It was cool to watch out the window and see how the area changed. I mean with the trees the color of everything that we saw. Since we were so close to the ground we could see animals running around and playing and living their life not knowing we could see them.

When we landed in the Mara, there were animals all around us. From the looks of it, I think that the animals thought we were just some other weird animal, the plane that is. Our guide in the Mara's name was Nixon. He was a Masai. In his vehicle he had some beverages for us.
 
The Mara was the coolest place we went to. And it was my favorite, we were there for three days. We stayed in tents that were right in front of the river were many hippos were. It was a beautiful place to stay at and the service was nice, the food was good, you could see animals across the river from your room or the dining area, and I had my birthday there. The Mara was the only place that we were not by ourselves on our drives. There was one other couple with us.

We took our first game drive in the Mara at four o'clock in the afternoon. It was unlike any of the other places, where we had to look so very hard to find one animal at a time, where in the Mara, we could not go ten minutes without seeing hundreds of Wildebeast or Zebras or any Gazelles and birds.

 Road block, Wildebeast style.

Thomson's Gazelle

 We also saw a lot of Topi which are what you see here.

Zebras playing

We were driving along looking for anything we could see, when Nixon, our guide, spotted one lioness behind a rock a little ways away. It was deciding if it wanted to try to take on a buffalo or not, so we watched it for a while, but it did not do anything, it was still interesting to watch though. We left the lioness and went to look for something else. We only went about two minutes when we found two male Hyenas laying down. They look surprisingly a lot like dogs.

This is Nixon

We left the Hyenas and started heading back to the camp, which was called Karen Blixen camp.

That was the end of our first day.
I will write about our second day next time.

Sweetwaters Camp

Hey everyone

Today I am talking about Sweetwaters in the Ol Pejeta Conservancy. We only stayed for one night but we wished we could of stayed longer but it was still nice to stay there. Right out side of our tent there was a water hole where many animals would come and drink the water there. The Warthogs were fun to watch eat, they stick their butts in the air and munch away on the grass.

When we got to the place we had lunch, and sitting or standing right out side the window of the restaurant, was a Maribou, which is like a mix between a Stork and a Vulture.

 And then after lunch, I got to go on a Camel ride. It was fun, but mine was being a bad boy, he kept stopping to eat leaves and he started to run one time.

At four in the afternoon we went out for a game drive. Before we actually started we went to a Rhino sanctuary and a Chimpanzee sanctuary. The Rhino was a blind black one, so he had to be kept in captivity so it could live longer than it would of in the wild on it's own. His name was Baraka.

 We didn't see much at Sweetwaters but we were glad of what we saw. But we did see vultures eating a dead giraffe and lots of gazelles and some giraffes and an elephant.

The next morning we got up and went to the town that was nearby so we could fly to the Maasai Mara. As a matter of fact that is what I will be writing about next.