Un Nuevo Vulcan y Mucha Pena

Hola everybody!

Last weekend I took an excursion with the school to the world´s newest volcano, which sprouted up in the middle of a cornfield about 50 years ago and has since grown quite a bit. Don´t know exactly how tall it is now, but I think it is approximately 700 ft. tall. It all started from a 9 ft. crack in the ground that a Mexican farmer noticed one day when he was out in his cornfield. It was belching smoke like crazy, and the next day the ground around the crack was so hot he couldn´t walk close to it. The crack smoked for about 1 year before erupting, so the town nearby had a chance to build new houses and move farther away before it blew. The experts had enough warning that they were able to take all kinds of mearurements and learn lots of things about volcanoes, so they were really excited. No one died, and while everyone in town lost their fields for farming, they were able to replace the income with tourism dollars. The farmer who owned the field attempted to find a buyer for his volcano for the rest of his life, at one time being told to look for an American named Rockefeller. He never suceeded.

This excursion involved a long bus ride, 2 hours of horseback riding on a homemade Mexican saddle (my first time ever on a horse), about 30-45 minutes of difficult hiking to the top, 15 minutes of looking down into a massive hole that still smokes in places (if we´d had more time, the natives say there are places where you can dig down and see molten lava flowing), 5 minutes of "skiing" down a steep slope of powdery ash to the base of the volcano, and two more hours of horseback riding (rather painful the second time around, actually) back to the bus. Joel and Kristi and I had a chance to get right up to the rocks that were smoking and steaming (when it rains, the water runs down to the lava and is boiled back out as steam) and hold our hands over the rocks, but it was so hot we couldn´t hold them in place for more than a few seconds. We ate in a restaurant in the little farming town where we got the horses, and then rode the bus back to Morelia. Did I mention that during the last 30 minutes of horseback riding, it was absolutely pouring rain and the slicker they gave me had no hood and wasn´t long enough to cover halfway to my knees?


In other words, this was a very entertaining excursion (seriously, it made me feel like a legitimate Marlboro man, except my horse would probably have made the Marlboro man laugh hysterically). I made sure I used my deepest, manliest bass voice for a day or so afterwards, going around saying things like, "Pardon, ma´am, but I ain´t got no hankerin´fer hombres what don´t hav none respe´t fer wiminfolks. Ah´m fixin´ tuh tear down that feller´s meathouse." It made me feel good, but people looked at me with rather strange expressions, I´m not sure why.

Also, after approximately one week I am now finally able to sit down comfortably. It hurt worse than when Dad used to beat my bottom mercilessly with a wooden spoon for not finishing my peas for supper before the timer went off...just kidding... :-)