Mexico Continued

From taking a mangrove-tour and seeing crocodiles in San Blas, to a sailboat ride, snorkeling and meeting new friends, here are a few pics from the second half of the trip!

Mexico, Sayulita and Puerto Vallerta

In order to capture your interest, and make this more interesting for me, I'm going to review our trip in sections. With that said, here is what the trip looked like.

Day 1-Puerto Vallerta
Day 2-3 - Sayulita
Day 4-5 - San Pancho
Day 6- Travel to/San Blas
Day 7 - San Blas
Day 8 - Travel to/Puerto Vallerta
Day 9 -Puerto Vallerta
Day 10-11 - Sayulita

Our hotel the first night, in Puerto Vallerta, was an art-gallery as well. We woke up to a flooded tile floor from an overflowing air conditioner. The first room-flood of three for the trip

Cooling off in Puerto Vallerta- it was hot and humid!

Villa de Amor, our villa, with a private plunge pool and amazing view...



Our living area and kitchen. This area was flooded by a huge storm our first night here (room flood number 2). The lightning and thunder knocked out the power and some water in the town, and was deafening and scary. We felt lucky to witness such a powerfull tropical storm!

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Breakfast at Villa de Amor. While in Sayulita, we had some amazing Mexican food, including some mole (a Mexican cocao based sauce) that was amazing!

The sunset view from our balcony..

Our balcony overlooking the ocean...notice the amazing swell coming in...

The villa that we stayed in in Sayulita was by far the nicest place we have ever stayed in! The view was spectacular, overlooking the ocean with jungle flowers and plants everwhere. Marble and tile floors, air conditioned and open-air, yes, they pulled that off. It was HOT! The humidity is around 90 percent and it rains almost every night. We happened to be there for an amazing swell, and we got some great waves. This break doesn't get this good that often, so we really lucked out and had head-overhead high surf the whole time we were there, surfing till we were too exhausted or sunburned. Oh yea, the water was about 80 degrees... much better than the central coast!

We stayed in Villa de Amor at the end of the trip and enjoyed Sayulita again the last day. Stay tuned for the rest of our trip! (PS If R. sounds annoyed it's because he really wanted to document the amazing surf.;)

Summer "09

Me and Christine on a Big Sur girls-surf-camp trip

Christine rejoicing when the AAA tow truck finally made it up to the Plaskett Creek campground to open the car. I locked the keys inside. Ahhh, wouldn't be a Hayes adventure without something like that!


Summer 2009 Begins
Camille= on summer break
Ryan= working but has furlough days

We have been enjoying the company of our good friends and family, and I have been enjoying the surf almost daily (yea summer break)! What are the highlights so far?

Well, here goes

• Growing tomatoes, carrots, squash, hot peppers, cucumbers, string beans, cantaloupe, strawberries, sweet peas, sunflowers... (to varying degrees of success) in our garden
• Homemade Strawberry jam, Marionberry jam, peach pie, cobbler, and ice cream (fruit's in season)
  
• Ryan's building a walnut and poplar coffee table for us
  
• Seeing our friends have beautiful babies and spending time with them, Rj and Ana, Katie and Avery, Shelly n Matt, Holly n Garth
  
• Chickens bullying the cats
  
• good surf
• Big Sur trips

One thing we learned, showing up in Big Sur with no reservations in July, is not a great idea, but do-able. Christine and I went on Monday and found a spot with no problem. I really wanted Ryan to be able to go up too, so I packed the car and his stuff, and we took off after work with Lyndal, on Thursday. Of course, there were no sites available, so we decided to treck into the hills and find a spot. After we almost rolled off a cliff in our truck trying to find a campsite above the cloudline, we decided to go back down and just stay in the "overflow" spot (Hayes-adventures continued). Early the next morning, Ryan and I made an aggressive prowl and we found one spot where the family had to go home sick, and reserved it for the second night. Barely got the spot. It was worth it. Sunny all day, decent surf and good company. That was the second or third big sur trip for the summer.

Next adventure on the calendar:

• Mainland Mexico, July 22 - Aug 1st, 2009
  

The Crib is Finished!

Finally, after sporadic weekend work over the last six months, I finished the crib I had promised for RJ and Anna and delivered it this last weekend. (With a month to spare) As usual, there are definitely some things I would do differently next time in order to speed up the process. I guess you're always learning...


Here is a picture of one of the joints. The four sides of the crib and the bottom can be taken apart and moved separately.



The inside of the crib where it attaches to the legs. There are three different settings for the bottom height of the crib.



Here she is. All oak, with the exception of the pegs, which are mahogany. This finish is a mixture of walnut oil and beeswax. And there are no screws, nails or glue holding it all together. Probably wouldn't build it that way again, but it was a great learning experience.