Baguio

Our 6-week summer holiday started with a fizz. We were all sick. They say that teachers crash at the end of term, while mothers crash at the end of the holidays. Well in our family, the teacher crashes at the end of term (and last year, he didn't quite make it through the last week!) and then the rest of the family gets the sickness too. So our first week "off school" was spent pretty much in bed or at least not doing a heluva lot.

Our second week, we went up to Baguio, which is in a mountainous area of Luzon, so it's cool! It's only 200kms north of Manila, but with the state of the roads here, and needing to have 'family friendly breaks' every couple hours, it took us more than 6 hours to get there.

Some highlights from our time in Baguio were:

Visiting the 'Easter weaving room'. Here, we got to see weaving in action. To be honest, I think we were as much an attraction to the weaving ladies as they were to us. Tessa sleeping in the sling was quite a talking point for the ladies. We ended up buying a few woven pieces for the walls in our new house.

We also went to 'Tamawan village', which is a hang-out for several local artists. They have re-assembled some traditional houses there, and they also exhibit and sell their artwork. The girls posed for some sketch portraits, and we got to keep those.

And generally, we just loved being able to play outdoors because it wasn't stinkin' hot! Check out the long pants and long sleeves!
There was also a butterfly sanctuary close to our 'inn', where the girls enjoyed getting 'upclose and personal' with the winged creatures.

And the other highlight of our trip? Sleep. It was dark, cool and quiet. Because we were sharing one room, the lights went out at 7:30. And stayed out. Our cards and magazines stayed in the suitcase. It was such a relief to be away from our inner-city apartment, where traffic noise and streetlights were our nighttime companions. And it was lucky we did go to bed so early, because Tessa's reflux really started kicking in here, so we were up several times a night, trying to prevent her from waking the rest of the inn's guests.

All in all, we liked Baguio so much, we're thinking of going back again for Christmas. But we'll see. We're told it can go down to 5 degrees at night in December. Seems awfully chilly to us...