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What do you mean the hot springs are closed?

This is what I have been able to wake up to the last few days. The pictures simply can't do it justice. We really are in a gorgeous place. We are all still catching up on sleep. Ammon and I didn't wake up until 11:00 this morning and we finally roused the kids around 11:30. I'm hoping our bodies can start to adjust before we head to Germany and need to adjust another 2 hours ahead.


 Today we struck out to the South to search out Furnas Valley after a breakfast of sweet bread. It is situated inside a volcano. We drove to the lake first to explore. We were able to hike around and see some pretty excellent sites.

Aside from the lake the most notable thing we could see at first was this church:






A little about the church: "Situated on the west shore of the Furnas Lake reflecting itself in the water, it is an impressive neo-Gothic building that is unique in the whole archipelago. The temple was built in the late nineteenth century by José do Canto (1820-1898), a renowned Azorean with a special taste for literature and botany who is buried there."

Cormac said this picture looked like the church was "peeing a rainbow in the lake." So I bet you can all guess how old he is. Of course, what does it say about the rest of us who laughed at his joke? 

Surrounding the church is an incredible garden that we were told is world famous. There was a very huge assortment of trees from willows to redwoods to pine trees to palm trees. They had these amazing rose trees everywhere as well with a huge variety of roses.


We had fun exploring the garden.








We stumbled upon a bunch of various fowls such as chickens, roosters, peacocks, and baby chicks. The kids were a big fan of the birds.

We then struck out to find a waterfall that we had heard was in the area. Unfortunately, that's about when the hangriness hit the kids. Which can clearly be seen in these next few pictures.



Such happy kids. We are struggling with keeping on a regular eating schedule and today we found ourselves out a mile or 2 from our car when everyone decided that food was more important than anything else and I made them all keep hiking to the waterfall. Such a mean mom.






On the bright side, the waterfall was stunning and the kids found a new gear hiking out of there. Total we hiked about 5 miles. We struggled to find an open restaurant today, but eventually did and had the most delicious cheesy garlic bread. That stuff was magical.


While in town I took pictures of a few of these bus stops. I really love all the tiles they have here. It is so beautiful. The people here really take the time to make their spaces beautiful between all the flowers and the tile. It is a really lovely place.





After dinner we headed to the hot springs. We had not booked tickets previously and the spot I thought we could go to happened to be closed. The place we found that was open was not selling more tickets so we were turned away. The kids were devastated. The main thing they have wanted to do since getting here is play in the hot springs.

We promised them ice cream to make up for it and headed back to the lake. On the opposite side from where we had been were the caldieras with open holes of boiling geothermal water. This is also where the locals make their Cozido (stew). They lower pots down into holes that have boiling water in them and cover the pots for hours to cook.



We got to see a family come remove their pot while we were there which was fun to see. They use giant hooks to pull it up out of the hole. Unfortunately, we didn't get to sample any of the stew. Maybe we can still do that at some point during the trip.



The trees over by the hot springs had this really cool orange moss growing on them. I don't know enough about moss to know why that happens and probably don't care enough right now to look it up, but I thought it looked cool. 

We found a guy there selling ice cream and so we ordered some. It was Ben and Jerry's (sigh). I told Ammon I didn't fly halfway across the world to eat American ice cream, but we weren't confident we could find an open place to get ice cream so we thought we should strike while we could. The kids can only take so much disappointment in a day. We sat by the lake and ate our ice cream then drove home. We got home just in time to catch the tail end of the sunset.




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