A quick update from Ecuador

A quick update. We have not had many posts this week and I’ll share a little bit about what is slowing that down, as well as our current travel plans. But first…

Last night the power went out in town. The power goes off a couple times a month…as does the water and many other services that we take for granted in the U.S. (other than New Yorkers perhaps). So the fact that the power went off was not unusual, but that it lasted some four or five hours was unusual.

What the kids discovered is that we have Firefly’s all around us! The lights of the buildings around us do not allow us to see these little creatures, and I guess we have not stood in an empty field at night since we’ve been in Ecuador…silly us. We have a vacant lot next door to our apartment and we are on the 3rd floor, so we could look out over the lot and watch hundreds of firefly’s dart and twinkle in the complete darkness.

The electricity did come on at some point during the night. I heard the cheers of joy from the kids and Gina telling them to “be quiet your dad is sleeping”…

Ok, we have not posted much this week because I have been writing morning, noon, and night. I have decided to launch a “full” Portable Parents website and have been trying to get it put together. I am hoping to launch the site on March 1st and there is a ton of work that needs to be completed by then.

Write all of the content, some 50 pages or more. Design the site. Code the site. Source photo’s. Etc, etc. There is probably a few hundred hours of work I am trying to cram into a few weeks time.

I am not expecting that those of you that read this blog will have much interest in the new website. This assumption is based on the fact that I think only family and a few friends are reading it, and that the blog is more of a travelogue for our little family.

The site will deal with a number of different issues some travel related like dealing with airlines or how to purchase around the world tickets, but will also deal with other issues such as personal finance and career change info.

I have decided to take the time to complete the website for a couple of reasons…

1. Creating the website was one of the carrots that I kept in front of us as we went through the process of leaving jobs, selling everything, and packing the gang up and head south. I kept telling myself that if we actually pulled this off that I would create a website about it.

2. I think this information will resonate with a few others somewhere out there. We already have a small following of families in the U.S. and Canada that we correspond with and that our message and adventure struck a cord in their own lives. I want to share our information because it was not easy finding this when we were planning our “escape”.

Oh, almost forgot. I created a new site – Portable Parents Photos

It is not ready for public viewing yet and there is not much on it right now, but check out what we have so far and let us know what you think.   It uses a different blog template that showcases photographs much better that the template we use for this blog. My personal opinion is that we have some pretty nice photo’s and that it is nice to showcase them in a setting that shows them off. So that is all this site will be, a place to post some of our nicer photos.

Lastly, we have decided to stay in Ecuador another month. That decision will take us up to Mid-February which will make the total time 90 days, and require us to deal with our expiring Visa’s. Somewhere in the next couple of weeks we will need to make a decision as to our next steps. They will probably involve one of two things, 1) make a border run to Columbia to get our visa’s renewed for another 90 days and spend another 3 months in Ecuador, 2) get out of the country before our Visa’s expire…probably heading to Peru.

The adventure continues…