Guatemala Trip

Greetings friends! We returned from our Guatemala trip a few weeks ago, but we are just now getting around to posting some thoughts. First, we would like to thank all of you that supported us on this trip. Thank you for your financial contributions, your well wishes, and the prayers on behalf of us. We would not have been able to take this trip if it wasn't for your help.

We arrived in Guatemala and enjoyed an evening getting to know our 16 person team that we would be building with for the next week. The team was very diverse, with people from all over the United States and from all walks of life. The common bond between us was a desire to serve families in Guatemala by offering our physical labor to build houses with the local Habitat for Humanity affiliate.

The bus drive to Xela, the city where we would be building two homes, was quite a bumpy and dusty drive. Dust was the norm in Guatemala and it was something that we were going to have to get used to. We met the two partner families on the evening we arrived and we each shared a little about ourselves. Hanna and I introduced ourselves and gave them greetings from our church in Portland, OR. We also asked them to pray for the church in the United States that continues to struggle to live together as the family of God and individually as disciples of Jesus.

The next day, our team broke into two and we showed up to the jobsite and started hauling blocks, bending rebar, mixing mortar, and tearing down an old adobe structure that we were using to fill in the floor of the new house. A requirement of Habitat for Humanity is that the partner family works at least 500 hours on their home or another home being built. When the home is completed, the family moves in and begins paying off a 0% mortgage at a monthly rate that is affordable for them. We were able to get to know the partner family of the house we were building by working alongside them for the week. The husband's name is Elias (22 years old), the wife's name is Ibet (same age) and their two children are Brian (4 years old) and Alex (3 years old). Elias works at glass blowing factory and does fairly well for Guatemalan standards--one out of five workers in Guatemala makes less than one US dollar per day. I developed a close friendship with Elias and spent most days working alongside him limping along with my broken Spanish. Luckily, Hanna was there most of the time helping to interpret. Hanna's favorite job was "striking" the walls after the masons laid the blocks. After the mortar dried for a few minutes, she would take a small, round bar and slide it between all the blocks to make smooth lines.

By the end of the week, both teams completed 90% of their house and we went forward with dedicating the homes to the families on our last day of work. The families were extremely thankful and questioned why we would travel down to work on their homes. It was amazing that such strong bonds were developed in only a week here in Xela. Elias' mother presented Hanna and I with a beautiful piece of cloth that she weaved while we were there working on the house.


(Hanna writing) The second week of our trip was spent outside of Guatemala City working at an orphanage named Casa Bernabe. This is the same orphanage where I had served in 2003. We were both put to work in the kitchen, one day peeling hand-aching amounts of potatoes, another day sorting massive mounds of black beans so they could be cooked (this involved removing rocks, bugs, and sticks). The food was delicious, the children were precious, and the staff was inspiring to us! We also helped with some gardening and David looked over the bikes for problems he could fix with the limited supplies. This was a good ending to our trip, and we thoughtfully and contentedly flew home to our dog and responsibilities in Vancouver. We were especially thankful for health and safety during our travels, and for the opportunity to have this experience. Back home, our roadways seemed so orderly, our air so unpolluted, our duplex so spacious, and our bed the most comfortable in the world.

Climbing again

I received a phone call a few weeks ago from a Waco acquaintance (Drew) that had moved here to Portland. I served him Thai food many times when he came into the restaurant I worked at during college. He told me that he had recently moved to the NW to work at a college and that he was looking for someone to ride bikes with and climb the occasional mountain. While I was over at his place building up his bicycle that had been boxed for the move, he asked me if I would be interested in climbing Mt. Adams with him.

Mt. Adams is located in Southern Washington, and at 12,276 ft. is the second tallest mountain in the state. I'd visited the forest surrounding the mountain last year during a hunting trip with my wife's brother, and spent much of the time staring at Mt. Adams and dreaming about going to the top. After Drew invited me to climb the mountain, I had two weeks to get in better shape. I had been running a few times per week, but I didn't want to kill myself with this trip so I spent the days before the trip running up a good size hill close to my house.

We took off a little late on Saturday morning. Our plan was to be on the mountain by 11:00 am, but it turned out to be more like 2:00 pm which didn't leave us a lot of time to make it to our camp before the sun went down. I felt good hiking the 5 miles to where we found a place to throw up our tent just before we ran out of light. The snow-covered site was on somewhat of a table at about 8,000 ft. and was surrounded by a wall of well placed rocks that helped to block the wind. We used our ice axes to carve a flat spot and jumped into our sleeping bags to stay warm while we cooked dinner and boiled snow to fill up our bottles.

The snow was extremely icy, so we slept in until 8:00 am in hopes that the sun would melt the top layer enough that our crampons would grab nicely. We had guessed correctly and the snow was perfect for our ascent. The last 4,300 ft. were pretty brutal--straight up a face unto a false summit and down the other side, then up another face to the real summit. We were both pretty exhausted when we reached the top but the joy of being there and the amazing view of Mt. Rainier, Mt. Hood and Mt. St. Helens quickly made us forget about how tired we were. We scrambled down the mountain for what seemed to be forever and were happy to take off our boots and rest our tired feet at the truck. We celebrated with a tasty meal and frosty beverage at Deschutes Brewery in Hood River, OR and made it back home by 10:00 pm. On our drive home, Drew and I talked about our ambitions to climb many other mountains in this region...it is good to have someone to climb with again.

I miss my former home of Waco, TX a lot (I'll have to tell you why in a future post). However, it is weekend trips like these that are easing me into life here in the NW.

Bicycle trip around the San Juans

Hanna and I have been back from our ride around the San Juans for a little over a week now. We already miss the simple life of living out of a few panniers, cooking on a camp stove and falling asleep in a tent under a star-filled sky and nestled into a stand of trees.

The San Juans are Northwest of Seattle and are often mentioned in books as being one of the most beautiful places in the United States to ride. That is not what drew us out there, but I wasn't going to be upset if this turned out to be the case. Now that I have a job that only gives me one week off a year, we wanted to make the most of our vacation--so we loaded up our bicycles and took off.

A work meeting took me up to Port Townsend on Friday and this was a perfect place to set off on our journey. We ferried over to Whidbey island and had a pretty intense first day to make it to Anacortes. If we were out for the day it wouldn't have been too bad, but with our bikes loaded up for 8 days, it turned into quite a haul. Hanna rode really well the whole day and we made it 55 miles to our campsite and launch pad to the San Juan islands.

The next morning we boarded the ferry that took us to Friday Harbor on San Juan island. Although it was a beautiful place, this was our least favorite of the three islands we rode. There were loads of people and quite a few cars on the roads (not to mention, dork mobiles--see picture). We found out early that these islands have very few flat stretches and the roads follow the hilly contour of the tops of these gigantic mountains in the ocean. We ended up boarding the ferry again that day and taking it to Lopez island to stay the night.

Our campsite was only 50 feet away from the ocean and was quite possibly the best place I've ever spent the night. After dinner we climbed in our sleeping bags and were hypnotized by the repetitious sound of the waves rolling over the boulders on the shore. Our ride the next day was fairly easy and it offered some great views. Lopez island is filled with farms and interesting people. For dinner we sat at a cafe and talked to two organic farmers that were cutting hay all day preparing silage for their cows. If you don't already know, silage is basically saurkraut for cows (or any other animal that is living off grass)--fermented hay. The farmers introduced us to one of their local condiments called Chicaoji. It is a hot sauce made from peppers, raw cacao, goji berries and a few other ingredients. We brought a bottle home with us.

The last island we toured was Orcas. This was a very challenging island physically, but well worth every calorie we burned climbing the long hills. At the East end of the island, we set up camp, dropped our panniers and rode up to the top of Mt. Constitution. This is a 4.7 mile climb and gains 2409 ft. in elevation. It kicked our tails, made Hanna cry, but we made it up. At the top, we could see all the surrounding islands and as far as Mt. Rainier. The ride down was fast and short to our camp that we shared with a fellow cyclist named Kelly. Kelly had just returned from living in Ireland for 3 years and is getting reacquainted with Washington by bicycle. We spent a day riding with her and she was definitely a high point of our trip!

We made it back to Anacortes the next day and rode halfway to Bellingham. We woke up early and rode into Edison, one of our favorite little towns on the trip. We sat at a small bakery called Farm to Market and talked to fellow cyclists and grubbed on the day old cinnamon rolls. Our ride into Bellingham on the narrow Chuckanut Highway was a little dangerous, but pretty spectacular. A few of my friends hosted us for the night in Bellingham and we enjoyed our first shower in awhile.

The next day we rode back through Anacortes and camped near Deception Pass. We arrived early in the evening so we had plenty of time to relax, sit by the fire with a weird guy from Canada (not that all Canadians are weird, but this dude was!) and eat a load of pasta with Chicaoji. Our final leg over Whidbey Island and into Port Townsend was successful. Although we loved being out, it was a good feeling to be done pedaling for a few days. We covered around 300 miles in the 8 days we rode.

Hopefully this is the first of many bicycle trips around the Northwest. Check back periodically for any trip reports or other ramblings from the Heddy's!