Alaskan Visitors!

We have had our first visitors...family from Alaska!  Steve's parents, Al and Marcia Veldstra, came, along with Cedrick, one of Steve's nephews.  Cedrick is the same age as Tyler and the boys had great times together!

We have been anticipating our first visitors for many months now and of course, had done a lot of work around our house the last two weeks prior to their upcoming arrival (the clay oven being one of those projects).  Steve went to Puerto Princesa a week early so he could buy supplies.  One of the big ticket items was a new generator as we had been getting by with an old one that was barely hanging on...thankfully it made it thru Steve being gone! He also wanted to buy some agriculture supplies since there was a big boat heading down our way.  Amazingly he was able to get all he needed and get it all on the boat within two days of arriving in Puerto!  Then he purchased a motorcycle, got his driver's license, purchased groceries including fresh meat which had to packaged and frozen.  Anyways, a lot of work goes into getting our supplies for what we need on the island.


Steve met his parents and nephew at the airport and they had one day in Puerto before the day long trip down to our home.  The evening before they were to come down...our plans dramatically changed!  Down on the island we were told of a night time roaming group of armed men in our area. Not knowing who they were or of their intent we made the decision to leave the island rather than bring our visitors to the island. So Stacey and the kids prepared the house for leaving, each packed a backpack, and we left early the next morning while it was still dark.  Scary times for all!  We had a very rough ride on the pomboat and were so thankful when land approached.  Steve met us in a rented van and we all rode together for the five hours to Puerto.  


Needless to say we were all very disappointed in the change of plans, but so thankful to be safe and all together.  It took Steve and I several days to regroup and change our thinking for our time with his parents.  Instead of working around our house on agriculture projects and showing them life on our island, we were now playing tourist in Puerto Princesa.  It is a beautiful place to be on vacation, just wasn't quite what we had in mind!  Thankfully the New Tribes guest house in Puerto had two rooms available for the two weeks they were going to be there...so that became our home away from home!


So...some of the things we did while on "vacation"!!  

Rented a van with a driver to take us to Sabang and the Underground River.  The Underground River is one of the seven wonders of nature.  It is an 8.5km underground river, but you can only take a boat up 4.5km of the river.  The tour took us 1.5km in the cave and up the river.  Very interesting with all the formations inside the cave and the thousands of bats on the ceiling!  We were all wearing hard hats...probably more to protect us from falling bat guano than anything else!  We spent two days in Sabang and the kids enjoyed the beach and surf!  

We also visited the Butterfly Garden...so fun to see the same butterflies that we see down on the island.  So many big, beautiful, colorful butterflies! Another fun feature of the Butterfly Garden is being able to observe a butterfly emerge from a chrysalis.  We got to watch several emerge and unfold their wings to dry and eventually try out their new wings! They also had many other big "bugs"...like scorpions, centipedes, millipedes, and geckos.

Kailee loves the butterflies!

Guess who likes to hold the scorpion?

We took many walks around and through Puerto, swam at a nearby beach, visited a couple agriculture places, went to church, did some touristy shopping, took them to our favorite places to eat, and so much more!

Even though our plans had changed and we were so disappointed over not taking our visitors down to our home...we are so thankful they came to see us and spend the time with us!  We were certainly sad to see them go as we miss all of our family in Alaska!