Valentine's Day

For Valentine's Day weekend we took a little trip down to San Salvador in El Salvador.  We stayed in the Intercontinental Hotel in San Salvador which was very nice.  San Salvador is a beautiful city with a good network of freeways, something we don't see here in Guatemala City.  Saturday we drove down to the Costa del Sol to go to the beach.  It was such a beautiful wide flat beach with nice tan sand and very gentle rolling waves in the warm Pacific waters.  We walked along the beach and amazingly had the whole beach to ourselves!  We found hundreds of sand dollars burying themselves in the sand as the water receded from each wave.  We had never seen sand dollars alive before. There are private estates all along the Costa del Sol, which I guess explains in part why we were the only ones on the beach.  It was such a nice day and we enjoyed the beautiful beach so much.  Sunday we attended Church with the Campestre Ward, a very large and vibrant ward that meets in the Stake Center next to the San Salvador temple.  We got to see the beautiful temple and its grounds--just a serene and beautiful place to be.  That afternoon we drove home along the Pacific coast, kind of the El Salvador version of Highway 1 in California.  We stopped along the way to see the beaches which got progressively darker colors of chocolate as we went.  The last beach we stopped to see was Dorada Beach, another wide beautiful beach with gentle waves and milk chocolate colored sand.  It was an interesting and enjoyable get away for Valentine's Day.  I am going to try to add some photos of our trip to the mission pictures page if I can.