Cuatro Cienegas y Monclova

Check out this beauty!  Valentine’s weekend we went up to this cool place in the city of Cuatro Cienegas (The 4 Marshes).  What makes this place so dang amazing is that it’s in the middle of a UT-like desert. 

Even in this picture you can’t see how really cool and bizarre it is.  The water is a crystal clear turquoise.  We were all bummed that we couldn’t swim in it.

We could, however, swim in the rivers that connect all the little pools, which we did.  This is me checking out the view.

 

See what I mean about the UT like desert??  So strange.  There weren’t any park rangers around to ask how this happened.  Even if there were, I wouldn’t have understood.

 

 

It was a perfect day and the water was warm.  This is Ben checking out his feet. 

On Sunday we had dinner with a family in Monclova, the Gonzales’.  This is a family that Ben taught and baptized way back when.  This is Ben 10 years ago…

…and this is Ben 10 years later with 2 missionaries, 2 temple marriages, and 2 – almost 3 – grandchildren.  It was very cool to say the least.

 

Everyone is still doing great.  Luke tells me he understands what the teachers say sometimes and that he doesn’t talk a lot.  His friends at school, so he tells me, are Diego and Patricio.  I have no idea if they talk to each other or just use signals.  Either way, he doesn’t seem to be bothered.

Luke went to the Bishop’s son’s birthday party last week.  The Bishop and his wife speak really good English and their kids can speak, but don’t usually choose to.  Anyhow, the Bishop said that all the boys went downstairs to play the Wii and Luke finally got his turn to use one of the controllers.  He said after that he kind of owned that controller because none of the other kids would ask “the American boy” for a turn.  They just took turns with the 2nd controller.  The Bishop said that even though most of them can speak English they are usually to intimidated to talk.  I guess Luke took the opportunity to play dumb and keep the controller.  Nice.