Today marks our first official day as a group traveling down to Mexico. Yesterday, my dad (Jeff), Carmenza, Angelo and I (Suzi) drove to El Paso where we picked up Quinn at the airport. We reunited with Elli and Jill today and finally completed our group.

After a quick Starbucks run we headed down to the border where we waited for about 2 hours before being able to cross.

Our traditional first stop is always the food stands in Villa Ahumada, Chihuahua where we get the best asidero cheese quesadillas with roasted jalapeño sauce to put inside.

One of Jeff’s favorite things to do here is buy some of the local snacks. His top choice is the chapulines (grasshoppers).

After we ate, it was time to get back on the road and start heading to La Junta where we will have Christmas with the kids there. About an hour and a half on the road we hit quite a large pothole, but didn’t think much of it. After about twenty minutes we hear a loud sound come from under the van followed by screeching. We quickly pull over to find out our muffler partially fell down and was scraping the road. Luckily, Jeff and Angelo knew just what to do to quickly repair our muffler and get us back on the road.

As we were driving we came across a Mennonite grocery store and decided to take a quick pit stop. While we were there to just use the restrooms, we stumbled across the biggest bag of cheese puffs we had ever seen.

Of course we had to buy it…

Once we loaded them into the van we were back on the road to La Junta. Due to our hold up at the border, muffler issues, and cheese puffs we got to the orphanage a little late. It was around 11:00pm and we thought everyone would be asleep and we would have to do Christmas in the morning. But we were wrong. We were greeted at the door by all the kids excited to open their gifts. We asked if they wanted to wait till tomorrow but they did not want to wait at all. While half of us unloaded all the gifts, the rest of us distracted them outside with loads of light up toys.

Soon enough we had all the gifts out and accounted for, and all the kids ran back inside.

One by one we called each kid up to claim their gift and made sure to tell them not to open until everyone had their present.

Finally it was time! All the kids got to open their presents, and it was crazy! We all rushed around trying to help kids open boxes and put batteries into toys. There was so much energy and excitement even though it was late. We could tell how happy everyone was with their new presents.

It was an extremely exciting night, and we were so tired by the end of everything. Once we helped clean up all the wrapping paper we finally got to settle down into the dorms provided by the orphanage.

It was a very long and exhausting day! We need to get some sleep because tomorrow we have to be up early to start heading to our next location in Creel, Chihuahua. Goodnight!