Esperanza

What's this? A new blog post? Hooray! This last week a group from my church (plus some friends and relatives) went on a missions trip to a remote camp up on Vancouver Island called Esperanza. This is my 8th or 9th time there and I just love it! It is so incredibly beautiful! It is about a 12 hour trip to get there including a two hour ferry ride, and 40 mile dirt road and a 20 minute boat ride into the actual camp. It is so fun spending a week there and just getting away from everything. While it feels like a vacation, a lot of our time is spent working. This year we had a group working on remodeling one of the old houses, another group building an equipment shed and another washing, scraping and painting the dining hall. I was with the scraping/painting group and it was quite the chore! There were two of us who scraped the majority of the building. It took us three day! Finally on the fourth day we got to do what we wanted to do all along and paint! I don't think it would have been nearly as bad if we weren't being swarmed by horse flies the entire time. While we worked hard, we also played hard. They have a big dock which people love to jump off of. The weather was so nice that there were people jumping off everyday! At night it is so dark that the bioluminescence is so bright! One night people jumped into the water at night and their bodies just glowed. It was so cool to watch! On our last night there a group of us took kayaks, Nucanoes and a real canoe and went to a waterfall about a 45 min canoe ride away. It is amazing and the water is so clear and cold! We got there right as the sun was setting and it was so beautiful. Anthony, Andrew and Justin were crazy enough to jump in! I put my feet in and that was more than enough for me! By the time we started heading back it was dark and the bioluminescence was so pretty on our paddles and in the wake of our boat! The stars up there are also unbelievable and we were lucky enough to see some pretty cool shooting stars during the meteor shower. The week went by way too fast and I am already looking forward to next year!