Day 6

The next morning, I woke up to the sun and hurried down to the lake to watch the sunrise. It was quite cold, but totally worth it. The lake was covered in fog, and as the sun inched up over the mountains, the fog followed it and there were even some small "tornadoes." The sun came up and brightened the water quite a bit. I hurried back to camp and Lance prepared coffee cake for breakfast. It was AMAZING!! We finally got moving around, packed up again and started to head out. Before we left one of our leaders Chris did something that I thought was pretty cool. He took each of us students and told us something he had noticed about each of us that had inspired or encouraged him. I bet you'll never guess what mine was...that's right, my smile, along with perseverance. He said he could always count on seeing my smile and that my smile gave everyone the energy to keep moving. (I thought it was pretty cool anyway). We loaded up and start the drive to the hot springs. I think the drive was only about 30 min, but the rest of the way to the hot springs was grueling. As we pulled into the park, the guy who took our money told us it was only a 3 kilometer walk, however, it turned out to be about a 7.5 kilometer hike into the canyon (keep in mind, we were in our shorts, a swimsuit, flip flops, and a t-shirt). Then when we got to the hot springs, they were PACKED and were just little pools, not really hot springs, but we swam anyway. Everyone else there was more or less drunk or were at least on their way to getting drunk. But we stayed and swam for a little while, but lunch time came, and we were ready to hike back up. It took me and Mel an hour to hike back up (I had a growing blister, and my knee was throbbing, as was Mel's, so we took it slow). We got to a stopping place where everyone was waiting on us and I drank 2 full bottles of water. The leader Chris ran to the top and drove the van down to get us. We drove to Divisadero (the touristy spot of the cannon) and shopped and looked at a great deal of the canyon. After about 2 hours, we loaded the van and headed back to the orphanage to sleep for the night before we headed back to America. This was a 6 hour drive and by the time we got back to Chihuahua we were starving, so we pulled in some money and ordered 6 boxes of Domino's pizza!!! For 8 of us to eat!! And all but one box was eaten. We stayed up a lot of the night talking and laughing and made it to bed around 2:30 only to be woken up at 5 to start our journey home.

We've got one more, the journey home...look for it on Thursday!!