Home sweet home

Saturday night we left on a bus at 9:30pm along with my family headed towards La Paz. We arrived in El Alto, just above La Paz at 4:45am yesterday morning, went to the airport and said goodbye to my family, ate breakfast and read a little in the airport, then walked back out into the cold to see the most amazing sunrise and hop on a bus at 7:00am which took us back to Cochabamba, where we arrived around 2:30. A long trip, but it was good to get to say goodbye and spend just a few more moments with family that we won't see again for at least another year. And also with that trip concludes all the family summer visits and Ann and I have the house to ourselves for the next 11 days before the housemates get back and they and Ann all go back to work for the new school year. Despite really enjoying our time with family, we are looking forward to things going back to "normal" where there is some routine in our day, Ann can rest some before going back to work, and I can pick back up on my thesis which I haven't even looked at in six weeks.
It was great to be able to share with our family a little of what our lives are like here and be able to share our church especially. We miss them but having them here really reconfirmed that we are in the right place right now. It was good to make that personal, face to face connection too. I realized how important they are to me and how easy it is sometimes to forget that after not seeing each other for so long and being so busy here. I realized I really have been out of the house for a few years now and have missed all that was going on in our house all that time. Maybe we can make up for a little lost time now.
To kind of mark the change in our lives, the weather has also changed. The last couple days my family was here it was cloudy for the first time since May. The locals say that every year near the end of July it gets cloudy like this and there is a lot of snow in the mountains and after that it is could for a few days, the clouds go away, and even though dry season still has a couple months there won't be any more cold. Instead, it is the beginning of windy season. Sure enough, on our trip to La Paz, there was a lot of snow in the mountains, bt even cooler was yesterday when we got back to Cochabamba, huge storm clouds were dumping snow on the mountains and it was even raining on us in the city. It was nice to feel the rain. You would think one could never get tired of the perfect weather here, but I do miss seeing rain. So it rained all night last night and we got up this morning to se more snow that we have ever seen before. Even our mountain right above us is covered in snow, and the Tunari and the taller ones to the west are completely white. It's still cloudy though, which I hope will clear up soon so we can go camping.