Playing by the stream.

After Ben, Johanna, Felix and Ruben arrived, the fun really began. Vincent’s choice of hat/sunglasses really sends him over towards the more hooligan side of fashion.

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Edda is the real trooper, we made her trudge up and down over hill and dale. She was a good sport a lot of the time. These vacations always seem to highlight Edda’s disabilities, it’s always a touch emotional for me with all the cousins playing around and Edda struggling with everything…

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Back from New Mexico.

We have been home for only a few hours – back from a spring break trip to New Mexico and Austin, TX. This New Mexico trip was inspired by Katherine, Jeremy’s mother, who has always wanted to live in New Mexico and loves being in New Mexico. She bought some property almost a decade ago in conjunction with the Nature Conservancy and now is ready to build herself a home on the property near Gila, NM. I have never seen Katherine so happy, making plans for her house and watching all of her grandchildren play together in the cold snow-melt rivers and getting dusty every day.

Gila, NM is not very close to anything, it was a 3.5 hour drive from the El Paso airport where we flew into. We were stymied by a dust storm which forced road closures and we detoured around the road closure which added another 2 hours to the trip.

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We were saving a box of Legos for Vince to build once we got to our bed and breakfast, but at some point, he was really frustrated with the drive, so we opened it in the car, hoping that the pieces wouldn’t be sucked into all the crevices.

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We finally made it to our little cottage which is about 4 miles off the main road on a little dirt path.

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The next day, we visited Fort Bayard, and even thought it was really sunny, it was really, really cold. We did not pack very well for the cold mornings. Edda, in particular, would have appreciated some gloves.

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As we left Fort Bayard, we noticed that the town’s coffeehouse was hosting a showing of birds of prey. We saw a captive golden eagle and a peregrine falcon. The golden eagle can kill a sheep. Yikes. The golden eagle is an endangered species and normally not allowed to be trapped by private citizens, but there is someway of obtaining a golden legally and Zoltar’s owner spent a long time telling us how he got the permits to have a pet golden eagle.

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Happy Birthday Donald (A Few Days Later)

Donald’s birthday will be on this week during weekday. Therefore, yesterday, Mom and I drove up to San Francisco to celebrate his birthday together. We met at the Stanford Mall to have lunch together. Mom bought him a birthday cake, balloon, flowers, etc. at various local stores (with big help from our new GPS) and I bought a 1976 CD for him with all the popular songs on it in a store at San Luis Obispo.
Afterward, they went together and Mom bought this sexy & pricey sun glass. Mom is in style in big time 🙂
We had fun together and were back to our hotel around 6:00 PM – doing laundary.