Happy Dia de los Padres!!

In honor of Father's Day, we have returned to civilization. Hi, Dads!! Ah, technology... how non-omnipresent you are. The past several days we've been staying in a tiny fishing village called Machalilla, wherein is a distinct lack of internet cafes... and thus the lack of blogging. We found this family (Cristobal, his wife Lydia, and their 4-year old daughter Llami-lexi, or something similar) that let travelers camp in their yard which, as you can see, is pretty darn close to the beach:

That's our tent, their yard, and... the ocean. Very nice.

Us with Cristobal and his family... their daughter Llami (pronounced jah-mee) is probably the cutest living thing in existence.

We've spent a lot of time exploring Machalilla National Park...

Beachcombing for dead things...

Mastering the sea...

Finding and exploring multitudinous and sundry sea caves...

Battling local crustacean widlife...

Snorkeling with equipment we rented...

We'd been talking about our mutual love for snorkeling for days... and after a side trip specifically to seek out snorkelig equipment and about a hour of wavering, we decided to take the plunge and pay the five bucks to rent the stuff for the day. This was probably the worst decision we've made on the trip thus far. Notice the terrible weather conditions. You can't tell, but it was also windy. And the water was far colder than any water that close to the equator should be. And we couldn't see more than about a foot because the water was so cloudy. And Nic forgot his trunks (see photo for details). On the bright side.... uh.... we got to joke around about how dumb we were.