We made it!

Which is the real parasailer? The two on the bottom are kid's toys but the one at the top of the photo is an actual person parasailing. I thought it was a pretty cool photo.

Chastity waiting for the bus outside the kingdom hall.

Don Spak & Ken Rempel, the two brothers who helped us look for apartments on Saturday. Ken and his wife Tammy have been here now for 6 years.

Dad, you could never make it here in Puerto Vallarta even though you CAN get Blue Bell at the Super Walmart.......This half gallon costs $9.63!!

This was a woman employee who was cleaning the windows at the McDonalds here.....she's actually using a squeegee and balancing on the narrow ledge!!!! I was so impressed!

Beat that Tim McManigal!

Chastity seems to be a little more successful at getting in shape on this trip......see next picture.

Hey, it's only the first few days.

Beautiful sunset with a pelican flying by.

Tacos at the little stand near our hotel. They only cost $.75 each! Looks like we'll be living on these!

Hello everyone! After an exhausting day of waking up at 3:30am we finally made it to our destination - Hotel Rio in downtown Puerto Vallarta. Everything went reasonably well on the trip here. After catching a taxi and arriving at our hotel we quickly unpacked a few necessities and then went for a nice walk along the malecon (boardwalk). The weather was near perfect for me today though a little cool for Chastity. It was in the 80's when we landed and once the sun set it cooled down quite a bit with very little humidity. This is a beautiful place and I'm pretty sure we are going to love our stay. I'm even sitting at a Starbucks cafe right now a block from our hotel since the wifi at the hotel wasn't that strong. PV (puerto vallarta) definitely caters to our american "needs". There's a Walmart, Sams Club, Costco, and tons of American restaurants. We found our favorite place around the block from the hotel, a little hole in the wall mexican joint. They made the most amazing tacos I've ever tasted!

Tomorrow we are suppose to be meeting up with the congregation coordinator and his wife. We'll keep you posted as to our living situation. For now, we have the hotel until Wednesday. Hopefully we'll find something more permanent by then. I'll try to get some photos posted soon. Adios!

Saturday, Chastity and I met up with Ken & Don, two of the brothers here in the English congregation. They were so kind to us. They took the afternoon off to go look for some apartments for us. They picked us up here downtown and the first stop was a great little Mexican joint over close to the Kingdom Hall. We peppered them over lunch with all kinds of questions to help us with our stay. They drove us all over the neighborhoods near the kingdom hall looking for places with "for rent" signs. We have a couple possible places, but nothing definite yet. After meeting up with Ken's wife, Tammy, we all went over to Don's house to meet his wife Sandy and enjoy some snacks and refreshments on their deck.

Sunday we decided to try out the bus and see if we could navigate our way over to the kingdom hall on the other side of town. We picked a bus that had on the front "Walmart" written on it, since we knew the Kingdom Hall was behind Walmart. After a little shopping, we decided that we didn't have enough time to try to get there via the bus so we grabbed a cab and arrived at the kingdom hall just as the song was being sung. The kingdom hall is beautiful and it even has air conditioning with really comfortable chairs! Afterwards most all of the friends came over to meet us. Seems that most of them are from Canada. One couple is from Chicago. Some are from Mexico but speak English or are learning English. We were invited to go bowling afterwards but since we still have lots to do to get settled we took a raincheck. We had lots of friends offer to drive us back to our hotel but we declined since we wanted to try getting to know the bus system better. Victor Hernandez, a special pioneer from Mexico City, told us which bus to catch and then took off on his mountain bike riding like a maniac down the bumpy streets. We hopped on a bus just as he left and about mile down the road at a light he went flying past the bus on his bike. Who knows, maybe Chastity and I will just get a couple of bikes!

Victor got us on the right bus, after about a 20 minute ride we got off about 2 blocks from our hotel. We walked along the beach back to the hotel and though it was a beautiful, sunny day with hundreds of people on the beach, there were only a handful in the water with is quite cooler here than down in Costa Rica. We haven't yet got up the nerve to jump in.