Wednesday, October 3, 2012

Santa Ana

Every Wednesday we travel to Santa Ana and work at the service center in the Modelo Stake Center.  Santa Ana was where the gospel was first introduced in El Salvador by missionaries who came here from Guatemala. This stake center is built on the first property owned by the Church in El Salvador.

 I love the palm trees here.

 On our way there we usually encounter plenty of traffic.  We are pretty high in San Salvador, so we have to go way down, then back up again to get to Santa Ana.  It is so true that here in Central America that if you are going, you are always either going down or going up.
 And of course if you think you need to get somewhere faster than anyone else you can make the two lane highway into a three lane highway.  Although we didn't get a photo of it, on this particular day folks made a 4 lane out of this 2 lane highway.
 Lots of trucks, especially sand trucks, not sure why that is.
 Always some kind of road work along the way
 We bring our lunch in our little cooler and have a picnic in our car.  We open the doors and there is usually a bit of a breeze and it is just a nice break from the busy day.
 The flowers are so colorful and there is even a beehive

We have always driven down on the Los Chorros highway but they are doing work on that road so now we go around the volcano another way which we have decided we like much better.  The road is in much better repair and it just seems a better way to go.  It takes us about an hour to get to Santa Ana from our home and we love to work with the people in this area. 
This is my favorite part of the drive.  It is hard to get a really good picture of it but it is like you are driving through a tunnel of trees. 

Corn, corn, corn, nothin' but corn

It is so amazing where and how much corn is planted here.  Last year we were here but were not travelling very much yet so we didn't see all the corn planted everywhere, where ever there was a space
 Down the mountainside


 Along side the road
 The corn popped up really fast and now they have harvested the corn and this is what is left.
Now coming up beside the corn stalks is another plant we think is maybe a bean plant.

Parking Lot Garden

This garden is down in the parking area of our apartment building,  We have a gardener here keeps things well taken care of.
 This bush looked like it had two different color flowers on one plant but upon closer inspection there are two different plants growing very close together and intertwined.
 This impatience plant shows great tenacity as it grows out of the cement  
 One of the banana trees
The view from the rear of our parking space.
The other banana tree.