Belize Mission Teams

Come visit our happenings in Belize at Holy Cross School at

www.stlukesinbelize.blogspot.com.

Snow!

It snowed much of the night and when we got up this morning there was about 3-4" on the table on the deck. It was a heavy snow so is sticking to the trees and it's just beautiful outside.


Our poor bamboo that usually stands tall at about 12+ feet is bowing down to the ground. This is the second time this season....hope it stands back up straight and tall again! It's to the left of the steps.

Meanwhile, in the front of the house the crowd has gathered with their sleds, cardboard boxes, or anything that will slide. It's a pretty wet snow, so none of the really great long runs, but alot of fun anyway.

We'll have ice on the road for a week, but it's so much fun to watch and remember back on all the fun times we had with the kids in the snow !

One more day of relaxing and then onto some serious catching up. It was a truly blessed Christmas around here. Hope it was for you too.

Merry Christmas!

Merry Christmas! We got up to hot chocolate and warm cinnamon rolls and then headed for the tree (small one as we weren't here for much of the time).

Plenty of gifts under the tree and Santa made a stop too. Good thing we put out the reindeer dust. Wanted to make sure they could make it all the way to Hawaii!!

Gretchen got some cute socks in her stocking....along with lots of other cool stuff. Even Mason got cool stuff, even though he was having fun at Tammy's house.

And John got a very special gift from Colin. Colin made the frame too! John asked for Habitat of Durham donations for his Christmas present this year and some lucky homeowner is going to be very happy with his presents! Thanks everybody who sent donations!!

After opening gifts we got cleaned up and headed for 10:00 church. This was the first time we had ever been to the actual Christmas Day service. It was very nice and quite a number of strangers that we got to welcome. Then we set up for the Sunday service and headed home. Had a mini Christmas dinner with Gretchen before she headed home ahead of the predicted snow. She did end up driving through snow, but not much that was sticking to the ground. Mason was delighted to see her when she stopped by to pick him up.

John and Jean picked up a little and then skyped with Jill. It was great to see the boys all excited about their presents. What a great invention skyping was!! Following that we watched the Nutcracker performance by the North Carolina School of the Arts. Very nicely done. Then we watched the Skating Awards program...also very fun. Then an unusual Christmas dinner of Vermicelli with Garlic Shrimp and Pumpkin Pie. It was a different Christmas this year, but I think everyone enjoyed it, even though we missed the Bairds being with us! Just to top it all off, we did have a WHITE CHRISTMAS - very late in the day, but on Christmas Day nonetheless!

Heading Home

Decided to head home today as there is snow predicted. A white Christmas!! Hurray. We packed up a lot last night so only had the last minute stuff to do this morning. We drove through the Alligator River National Wildlife Refuge along the way home, but didn't see anything new. Stopped in Rocky Mount for some really good BBQ and got home mid afternoon after a couple of shopping stops and the post office to pick up mail. It was a fun visit down there...very different when it's cold and not many folks around. Nice change for Christmas. Thanks Gretchen for putting up with the old folks!

Merry Christmas to all!

Jockey's Ridge State Park and shopping

Today we stayed in Nags Head and saw the sights here. It was a sunny day, but cold and the wind was really blowing. We headed to Jockey's Ridge State Park just down the road. This 400 acre park features the tallest natural sand dunes on the East Coast. Some are 85' high. Again, we had the place all to ourselves (who else would be wandering shifting sand dunes in a gale?). The blowing sand was fascinating to watch and we were all prepared for the cold, so it was an interesting walk over and between the dunes. It almost felt like we were in Antartica with the blowing snow pictures you always see. Lots cooler than when we were here several summers ago!

Gretchen

We wandered the dunes for about an hour and then headed for some shops that we'd passed that looked interesting. And then to the Outlet Mall to check out a few of those shops we hadn't done yet. Very nice day.

Pea Island National Wildlife Refuge

It was a bird watching day for John and Jean and Gretchen had a day to herself to walk to the outlet mall, read (unfortunately, her book was in the car with us), and start the essential Christmas cinnamon rolls (yum!!).

John and Jean headed south to Pea Island National Wildlife Refuge. Pea Island is nearly 6000 acres. There are several paths you can walk along beside the North Pond. This time of the year many of the migrating birds are here.

Whistling Swans - there were hundreds.

Common Pintails - also abundant.

Shoveler

Bufflehead

Back of bufflehead - the red is his foot..

Blue Heron

White Ibis

Then we saw what looked like a large flock on the water in the distance so we headed down to the end of the pond and found this....

hundreds of Redhead ducks. And hundreds more in the adjoining small ponds. They got a little nervous with us around and once one took off, the others soon followed...

but usually landed nearby.

As we headed back to the car we saw this Great White Heron as he caught his lunch....

tasty...

arguing swans....

then one more stop at the north end of North Pond...

a hunting Blue Heron...

a snow goose...

and a Double Crested Cormorant. It was a birders heaven.

We headed back to the timeshare and helped finish up the cinnamon rolls, worked on the puzzle more and generally relaxed. Great day!!

Lunar Eclipse

Gretchen woke us up at 1:30 am and we bundled up and headed for the beach to watch the lunar eclipse. What a sight! It was clear as a bell out and the waves were crashing behind us as we gazed up and watched the changing light. This was at 2:40.


And this was at 3:07 when we finally decided it was about as complete as we could handle and headed inside where it was warm to thaw out! It was about 30 degrees and a nice brisk breeze on the beach so we thought we'd done pretty well to last that long. Was great though!