I'm Back From South America!!!

Hi Everyone! I'm back from vacation, and revved up for the autumn beading season! :) I hope to keep a continuous stream of items on Ebay (cleaning out some older "sale" beads this week!), and I also plan to have lots of really neat new beads and jewelry, in fall colors, available soon. So keep checking back on a regular basis! Although I'm taking 2 classes this fall and working 40 hours a week, I am really going to try and keep up with my jewelry and bead-making.

David & I had a really great vacation to Peru and Ecuador. I hope to be posting some pictures very soon! Hiking the Incan Trail was the most physically challenging thing I've ever done. Sometimes we’d be hiking up stone steps for seriously 2 or 3 hours. Then we’d be hiking DOWN for that long. But that’s the mountains for you! We camped in tents for 3 nights along the trail, and it was chilly and sometimes there was chickens and turkeys making funny noises all night. :) Our luggage didn’t arrive til a week into the trip, so that was a bit of an annoyance, but oh well... It was hard to get too upset about lost luggage since the whole area we were in was so poverty-stricken. :( We had never visited a third-world country before, so it was a real eye-opener for us. Most of the buildings were falling apart, and there were wild dogs running everywhere. It was definitely a unique (and sad, sometimes) experience.

When we went to the rainforest, it was SUPER hot, but we got to see a few monkeys, a GIANT tarantula, some sloths, some birds, and pink dolphins, which was a nice treat! They were actually pink! Apparently they are only found in that part of the world. :) And it was neat to sleep in a thatched-roof jungle hut and ride in a motorized canoe up the Amazon River.

The second half of the trip was an 11-day cruise through the Galapagos Islands. There’s really no way to adequately describe how awesome the Galapagos Islands are!!! The animals aren’t afraid of people, so you can totally walk right up to all the birds and sea lions and giant tortoises and iguanas and they don’t run away at all. Unfortunately you aren’t allowed to touch them - it was very hard to resist snuggling the baby sea lions! They were sooooo cute!!! We got to snorkel with sea lions swimming around us, and big turtles and tons of fish as well. We even saw a (harmless) shark in the water, and 2 HUGE manta rays (like 8 feet across!!!) We got to snorkel practically every day, at different islands, and go on nature hikes on all the islands as well. The blue footed boobies were our favorite animal - very adorable birds with bright blue feet. There are also red-footed ones, and some that are called masked boobies that are mostly white with dark brown accents. Many of them had fluffy baby chicks that were just soooooooo cute!!! And the iguanas were just lounging and walking around, sometimes we could see about 60 or 70 of them in the same place. We had to step over them as we walked around. :) And it was so neat to see the marine iguanas swimming around, and some were munching on algae under the water. I got to see one doing that when I was snorkeling. It was seriously just amazing!!!

But now it’s back to work and back to school. Back to reality. All this hurricane damage is absolutely awful... We flew back into Miami, then back home to Michigan, right before the hurricane struck New Orleans. Luckily the hurricane didn’t get in the way of us coming back home. But it was still scary for us, mainly because my sister Barbara graduated from Navy boot camp in Chicago on August 19th (we were still in South America so we couldn’t go to the ceremony), and then they sent her to Biloxi, of all places!!! That’s where she was supposed to do 3 months of training. But she got there, and then the hurricane hit a few days later, so her & all the other military personnel were holed up inside a hurricane-proof building for 4 days. At least everyone was okay. But still...we were quite worried because we didn't know what exactly was happening down there! The military base didn’t evacuate or anything. A couple days ago, they finally sent her & some other people to Pensacola, Florida. That’s where they’ll do her training now. But they probably won’t start til next week, since everything is so disorganized right now. I'm just glad she's safe.

So that is what is new with me! Stay tuned for vacation pictures, and please keep checking back for more jewelry/bead updates as well.