An unexpected day...

When I got to the hangar today, Steve and I were looking at our flight schedule and determined that maybe I could take the day off due to a "light" number of flights. Usually when you are on call like I was this past weekend you take off Friday for sure, and then the following Monday if you ended up flying on Sunday. Well, due to the large amount of flight to get done last Friday, and the fact that it is just me and Steve as pilots at the time being, I couldn't take Friday off. So, without much convincing I ended up coming back home today with the whole day ahead of us to do something fun!

Becca and I hadn't had a good day to just goof off and just see where the day takes us for a while. After we ran a few errands, we jumped in the Bronco and headed for the mountains. Becca doesn't usually know what she is in for when she gets in the car with me on my "let the car take you where it wants to" expeditions. We ended up covering a lot of country today, and seeing some awesome things. We only had to put the Bronco into 4 wheel drive once. We didn't see much pavement, and we saw a lot of country roads, Ecuadorian style.

I have been eyeing a bunch of side roads on the road to Quito for some time. Today was our chance to start taking some of those that started about an hours drive from our house. We saw some of the most stunning scenery and people that we have encountered thus far living here in Ecuador. We got to drive across a few streams, a few bridges the width of my Bronco, and even stopped once and got our feet wet.

I was able to get some more ideas for some great photo locales for some great shots of volcanoes when the weather is good. We even gave one woman and her two girls a ride up one of the mountains as the girls were getting out of school. It was the steepest road I have even driven on, and these girls walk it to and from school everyday. The mom told us that it is 1 hour to school, and 2 hours home walking uphill. Needless to say they were skinny. There is a reason America is fat and unhealthy, and it is because we don't walk anywhere anymore. That is the one thing that continues to amaze me living overseas. We have two legs, and the people I live around actually use them to walk from point A to B. Novel concept!

The fun thing about exporing like this, is that it just continues to open up your curiousity. So, rather that be satisfied now that I know where all these road lead, and to what, I have seen even more roads and pueblos that I want to explore and drive to. Good thing I have this coming weekend off too. Maybe another spur of the moment road trip will be in order.

Here are a few shots from today's wanderings....a great day off work indeed...
Mommy took a picture of Brooklyn and me as we were goofing off in one of the mountain streams. It was some pretty cold water, and Brooklyn wasn't to thrilled about getting n too deep.
This is the road that we gave the mom and her two girls a ride up. Pictures always do a bad job of showing steepness, but we were in STEEP country! Although it was in the clouds, Tungurahua volcano is also directly in the center of this pic. Hopefully one evening I will go back up on a clear night and get some cool lava shots. Once again, the volcano is getting very active, with large plumes of smoke and ash burping out. Although this latest stint of activity hasn't produced any lava flows, they could begin again without warning.