More Visitors From Home

Uncle Leroy with Paula

The month of March brought us visitors from our home town of Yoncalla. While Uncle Leroy and Aunt Carol are not technically related to us in any way, they have "adopted" our children to be their nieces and nephews. Leroy and Carol have traveled literally ALL OVER the world, but have never (at least to my knowledge!) gone and stayed with a family in another country. Our house is a busy noisy one, but they seemed to thrive on having the babies swarm all over them!
Carol brought us all kinds of treats and gifts. In fact most of the weight in her baggage was for us. Peanut Butter and Chocolate Chips anyone?!! We have been slowly savoring the "tastes of home" she brought for us, as well as the many other things...thank you again, Carol! She also brought easy crossword puzzles and spent time with the kids on teaching them how to do them.

Crossword Puzzle time with Aunt Carol

 Leroy is going to be 90 this year and is a World War 2 veteran. Not every day you get to host a World War 2 veteran in Bolivia or the U.S. for that matter!! The elevation seemed to effect him more than Carol, so he spent a lot of his day in our maroon Lazy boy reading books to the children. I think that "Eddy" was his favorite, as Eddy pestered him the most! For Eddy to sit still for more than two minutes is incredible and he did that regularly with Uncle Leroy!

The Little Boys enjoying time with Uncle Leroy

A. getting in some reading time too!

 Since Carol had brought so much for us, she had to "refill" her bags with gifts for her friends and family back home. Emily and I went with her a couple times to buy souvenirs and memorabilia from Bolivia. The funniest thing that she took home with her, was two rolls of toilet paper! She likes to take back some type of canned good or packaged item from each country that she travels to that is unique to that country. She found our toilet paper quite interesting. About every fifth "square" has a little dog holding a stop sign that says, "pare"(stop)! I had never considered it before, but it is pretty cute and unique!!

Aunt Carol enjoying A.

 The last day that they were here, Leroy was able to share about some of his experiences in the South Pacific during World War 2, with our local private Christian school, Carachipampa. The High School age youths there have been studying WW2. You can imagine their happiness in having a REAL WW2 veteran share with them! Rudi took Leroy and Carol for the time at Carachi and he said that it truly was an amazing experience for everyone there, including himself! Thank you, Leroy, for sharing from your wealth of life experiences.

F. and Eddy hanging out with Uncle Leroy

 After looking through my pictures I realized that Carol is the one who had taken all the pictures of us "out and about". All I have are inside the house pictures of their time here...We took them up to Paurumani Park and out on lots of drives through the city. As well as. out for some native foods like Charque and Pique Machu. We tried to take them on the Gondolas to the Christo, but it was closed the whole time they were here...grr. When there were bloqueos one day, Carol got to experience "off roading" in our truffi. Going the back roads got a little wild, but she said that it was warming her up for the Safari's she is planning on taking in Africa this December! Both Carol and Leroy were great guests, easy to please, thankful, and very flexible! We are glad they were able to come and are thankful that they stayed relatively healthy during there time with us.  Leroy had a chest cold some of the time.

Snack time with Aunt Carol! Gettin' spoiled by all those treats!

Leroy and Carol continue to amaze me with how well they get around and travel...Of course, it helps that Carol is quite a lot younger than Leroy. Still their love for travel and adventure is amazingly high for their ages. We are glad they made Bolivia one of their places to visit while we were here to host them...