Four Weeks & Counting!

Wow! After over a year of planning, it is now just four weeks until I leave on a three month sabbatical. And I will begin with a return trip to Guatemala of about five weeks. The first week I (with my daughter Rachelle and her boyfriend) will spend doing some exploration of areas west of Guatemala City that I did not really see before. We'll spend some time at Panajachel and Lake Atitlan, including a nature reserve with all sorts of wildlife and several zip lines at the treetops. Next will come a morning at the well-known market at Chichitenango (ChiChi for short). While there we'll be staying in a Mayan home. Then we'll be doing a guided hike up an active volcano and staying there overnight. After that we'll travel back to Xela, where I studied before, take a one day tour out of the city to a hot springs and some other area places of interest (possibly a glass blowing factory, a coffee plantation, the shrine of Saint Simon, and a market.) After a day in Xela (also known as Quetzaltenango) the kids will head home and I will study Spanish for three weeks at La Paz, one of the many local schools. That may include some volunteer time at an orphanage. And I hope to travel to one or more villages with a Presbyterian medical worker. Time spent with Cubs and Scouts is a given of course.

Following my time there, I will head back to Canada, but stop in Toronto for a couple of days, and then fly to London (England), and after a couple of days touring the city and some nearby historic sites like stonehenge, I'll visit my father's ancestral home in north-east Scotland. I'll be camping in Aberdeen and Turriff, meeting a Cub Pack and Cub/Scout leaders at Fyvie (and hearing some good Scottish music), visiting a number of villages my people used to live in, hopefully getting to the famous abbey at Iona for a couple of days, visiting the Scottish Crop Research Institute at Dundee, and making my way back toward London with stops at Hadrian's Wall and at Lindisfarne (another famous abbey).

The last month of my leave will be spent mostly at my farm, with time away for Cub Camp at Moose Jaw and probably our annual meeting at North Battleford. I hope to do some gardening and reading.