His Mis-sionary: ~Family Vacation, Pt.1~

School break began as soon as the last final exams were taken Thursday, December 13. All except for maybe 40 of our students and some of our Karen staff left that day. Usually our family stays at the school during breaks, but this time we decided to leave early Friday morning for a much needed family vacation. Then we planned to return probably on Tuesday. We took Heidi Reinecke, too. (She's part of our family. ;))

I hope that you all enjoy "going" on the vacation with us and "experiencing" a tidbit of our adventures and explorations together.

~Friday, December 14, 2012~

Friday began, at least for some of us, at 4:00 AM. We left our little home around 6:00, a little while before dawn would fall over our hills. We had breakfast at a restaurant in Mae Sot, a small city two hours away from home.

After breakfast, we did some last-minute shopping for our "picnic" (what they call "camping"/ "camp-out", ect. around here) before heading to our first destination--a waterfall.

Two huts that are used to store the harvested crops in. These were probably for corn.

We finally arrived a few hours later at a national park that has a waterfall which is near the tiny town Umphang.

We paid to be able to go to the waterfall and then began driving down the 26 km road to the falls. We only drove a short distance before we began to meet some large muddy spots in the road. We barely got through without getting into a possibly big mess in the last one that we dared to go through. Thankfully, after going through that one, we saw a truck ahead of us who was sliding all over the place in a very bad mud hole on a steep, up-hill part of the road. That was enough for us, and back we went to the place where we paid to go in. Sadly we had to miss the waterfall.

The workers there were so kind and told us that we could sleep for free in a gazebo. So, that's what we did.


It was pretty nice to be able to sleep next to a small river, too.

Singing some of our favorite hymns (in English!) while being accompanied part of the time by Hannah playing her recorder. A very special Friday evening worship, to say the least. :) I slept under Hannah and Heidi.

Eating juicy, sweet oranges for supper.

It was cold at night and in the early morning, but I stayed cozy for the most part since I had longjohns, two pairs of socks, my fleecy, and two blankets (one of which was wool). Don't know what the lowest temperature was. Seriously, it gets quite cool around here in the cold, dry season.

~Sabbath, December 15, 2012~

After personal devotions and worship, we had a yummy breakfast. Some of what we had was pumpkin, coconut curry--"curry" is the general name used around here for any stew, stir-fry, or other such topping that goes on rice.--and roasted, young coconuts.

Then we packed up.

The following pictures were taken before we left.


Misty jungle

We took off exploring down a road. The scenery surrounding us made a very nice, relaxing Sabbath morning drive over hills and through dense jungle.

We decided to turn around after a while and went to explore some near by caves. Little did we know what an awesome adventure we were soon to get ourselves into...

Singing in a cave has to be one of the best things ever to do. Love it! We sang a lot of Christmas and a few non-Christmas songs throughout our time in the cave. =)

We went exploring a lot off of the main pathway. It was so much fun.


Singing away again.

Heidi looking at some interesting spider.

Needless to say, we were hungry when we finished our first cave exploration. We had a nice picnic lunch and then headed off with hopes to find two more waterfalls.

Took this picture of a Buddha while we were trying to get directions to the falls.

We searched and searched and ended up going down this long dirt road that seemed to go on for eternity. We ended up out in the bush of Thailand without another soul or any hint of civilization around. We saw one sign, but it was in Thai and looked like it probably had nothing to do with anything we'd be interested in. Instead of ending up at the waterfalls, we found ourselves at the entrance of a wildlife sanctuary. The gatekeeper seemed to be surprised at our coming. He was quite friendly. Mom, who can speak and understand more Thai than the rest of us, tried to get directions from him. He told us to turn around and go 14 km down the road. To add to the fun of the adventure, Heidi sat on top of the car, mom in a door, and Hannah and I on the bumper. We saw a lot of what we thought was likely elephant dung, but we saw no elephants. This all made us feel a little like we were in the "safari" of Thailand.

About 14 km later, we were back at a Karen village. We decided to ask some of the villagers where the falls were. "Tee la schoo oh peh leh?...."They told us to turn around and go back 1 km which found us down another dirt road, this time amongst corn fields. Before getting to the end of the road, some farmers motioned for us to turn around.

After turning around, we kept on looking for a little bit longer, but ended up giving up.

Because of all of this we started an inside joke. If we couldn't find a waterfall or something else, we'd sometimes say "We're [I'm] looking for a waterfall." or something similar.

Sundown was soon to be on the horizon, so now we needed to get busy and figure out where we were going to spend the night.

We found a very nice, little hill that had a fairly flat surface for us to sleep on. We took up there all the stuff we would need for the night, including oranges, mangosteens, and crackers for supper.