San Pedro, Paraguay - On The Cutting Edge of Technology (or not)

Well, here we are in the Santa Ana Hotel in San Pedro and I'm writing on a laptop using wireless, high speed internet technology. Sounds pretty advanced, right? Well, yeah. This part is, but the rest of the city is not nearly so. We've seen a wide range of technology here, but that will have to wait for another blog. No time to write about it all tonight.

We started out for San Pedro this morning and we were on the road by 8:10 (goal was 8:00, so we did pretty good!). We were driving for MAYBE 20 minutes when I looked behind me at Stephen just in time to see him mouth, "Mommy, I think I'm going to throw up!" I grabbed a towel that Karen had sitting next to her and the poor kid puked all over the towel, his shirt, his shorts, shoes and unfortunately, the towel we had down on the seat and on the floor. Karen had pulled over by this point and Stephen stumbled out of the car to heave another load. Blech! As the mom, I had the privilege of also getting spewed upong.

Stephen got cleaned up, the car got wiped down as much as was possible with a couple of wipies and I tried to force down some anti-nausea medicine into all the boys. We were on the road again, only to hear Christopher's meager littlevoice say, "Mommy!!!!!" I grabbed a plastic bag this time and the poor kid vomited HIS breakfast into the bag, too! Once again, we pulled over, cleaned another kid up, wiped Mommy down and started off again. Thankfully, that was the last of the barfing. I think it was because they're not used to being so free in a moving vehicle. They're used to their carseats and boosters in the van, but here, there's no car seats, no seat belts, no restrictions. Plus, the Paraguayans love the thrill of weaving in and out of traffic. There was just too much movement for their little tummies.

So we get to San Pedro, checked in at our hotel (which is only about $21/night because we have kids - Jason has a room to himself so his room is only $11/night), and started off toward Oscar's family's homes. Karen asked, "Where's Stephen?" Huh? I thought he was with Fred in the other car, but Karen said she didn't see him. She quickly called Oscar's cell phone and found out that neither Stephen nor Timothy were with him and they weren't with us, either! I ran back into the hotel, frantically looking for them, but all our rooms' doors were locked and they were no where to be found! Finally, they came down from the third floor where they were trying to find the balcony that they had seen from the outside. Boy, did they get in trouble!! We gave them a good lecture about being away from us in a foreign country, etc, etc.

Anyway, I could write tons tonight, but we're going to sleep. We have another long day of visiting and driving ahead of us and we need rest. I'll write more when we get back to Asuncion.

I need to remember to tell you about:
* stopping for cows to cross the road
* the bread that Oscar's mom made in her brick oven
* the beautiful scenery on the way here
* the red, red dirt that is everywhere
* the car that Christopher pulled out of a blob of dog poop (or maybe I don't need to tell you that story)
* the ant hills that are taller than the boys and solid as a rock
* the way the folks in San Pedro love to fellowship and just sit around and talk with each other
* and more!