Some of our adventures since friday morning!

This is Carole Marti, coming to you from the Esparanza International posada in La Gloria, a very small community from outside of Tijuana.  Today we got up early (yet again!) and we had stayed at the parish at San Juan Capistrano south of Los Angeles last night.  What a beautiful parish we got to stay in - their youth room was complete with awesome couches (not the old used variety) and cushions and projector screen (we watched the movie "up" last night), kitchen in two different room, you name it they seemed to have it. However, one small detail to remember is their parish has 3800 registered families!

So we left San Juan Capistrano this morning around 8:30 am and headed to San Diego airport to meet up with the St John Vianny group from Kirkland - there are about 30 of them here also.  And the other group we are here with (about 20 of them) are from St Vincent De Paul in Seattle.  So we have like 80 people here altogether - food and common living!!!!!  When we got to San Diego, we headed to the rental car agency to add insurance to drive our vans into Mexico.....and suffice it to say we had some challenges while there (could not locate one of our rental contracts which evidently was essential....eventually found it), had to surrender our 2 Surburbans (you cannot drive them into Mexico evidently), and then wait and wait and wait.  We were there about 2 hours before headed out to cross the border.  There were 7 vans (5 from holy cross, 2 from st john vianny who stayed behind the rest of their group to accompany us) and we were quite a scene going down the freeway. Crossing the border was pretty non eventual - we were basically waved through.  We had a 17 mile drive around the outskirts of Tijuana to get to La Gloria - the kids saw some buildings and housing and other "sights" that made an impact just in that drive.

We were so happy to get to our posada - it is a very nice facility - it is gated and has a beautiful courtyard and use of water is at a premium.  They have a great composting system here and also lots of recycling and you name it, they save it and reuse it.  The two long term volunteers here on staff (Kimber from Rhode Island and Eric from Seattle) are great and a terrific resource in what to do and where to go and such.

Jim Van Dyke and Carmella Barger accompanied folks from St John Vianny to the Tijuana Costco this afternoon to purchase breakfast and dinner makings for the week for 80 people.  We do communal breakfasts and dinners; lunch is provided at the work site by the familes that we are building homes for.  We have huge jugs of drinking water that we take to the work site for drinking throughout the day.  Drinking water and staying hydrated should not be a probmel as long as the kids do their part....with lots of prodding from some of us adults.

We are preparing to eat some great mexican food for dinner tonight from a local place in La Gloria, and do some combined praise and worship with the toher 2 parishes, and get our small groups going again tonight (we did not meet last night due to time but did do so the first night when in San Jose).  The kids all got to eat at In-n-Out burger in San Jose on Friday night and most of them should be bringing home the In-n-Out paper hats since everyone was wearing one at the restaurant!


(sarah gluck and shaun marti just showed up and they took a web cam pic of themselves that they want me to upload to you all....am not sure if i will be able to - but here is a note that sarah just typed):

Hi Mom-Sarah Gluck




ok so that was it for sarah!

I did also upload some photos for you all to see - the last one was a pic from the courtyard of the posada.

Time willing, we will post to the blog again tomorrow. Would love to see your comments!



Blessings in Christ,

The 2011 Holy Cross Mission Trekker team