Agusan Del Sur, Trento

We were invited by Richard and Jessa to their house blessing and house warming party for saturday 28th Feb 09 and went with a car full....Mats and Cora invited....2 maids, Germaine and Lizelle and Lorenz and Annika as well of course, dropped off Joy (who had been staying with us) in Tagum on the way through to Trento.

It was a pleasant 3 hour drive and the road was good, we missed the turning but quickly corrected ourselves and turned left for the Tansley place...i knew it was big and on a hill...seen some pictures and Paul had also described the place for us and we spotted it through the trees, approach was through a set of gates and past the guardhouse, yes guardhouse, over the river and sharp left up a steep incline, felt like about 60deg in one place but sure it would get easier after a few goes, made that with a deep breath and first gear.

As you can see with the pictures Richard and Jessa took on a big project with land clearing, building and maintenance...sort of 3 hectares of land but then there are adjacent rice fields, stream and pond and woods, Richard is a bit of an estate management person and he now has his own to manange and beautiful it is too.

Party was great, food and drinks and all the normal philippine hospitality and the only monkey there was the rain...not exactly true actually coz they have a monkey, birds, guinea pigs and other wildlife...back to the rain, yes it rained for nearly all the time we were there. Richard and Jessa are used to it and we have rain too in Davao but not quite like this and it went on for a long time, probably still raining now.

Lovely party and great fun, off we went home next day and had a funy incident when we were dropping off Lizelle in Monkayo on the way home to visit her family. We stopped and drove to within say 1 metre of Lizelle's house people started gather...who was this....rich foreigners turning up in the local Baranguay. Ann wound down her window and asked her Mum, where is Lizelle? (she was in the back seat behind tinted window) panicky relatives explained that lizelle was working away, which turned to laughs and smiles as Lizelle clambered out of the car....don't know if it comes across funny but it was and smiles and Cige Salamat (thanks goodbye) all round.

Had an uneventful trip home and went with Mats for a few cold beers what more can you ask for on a sunday............well there was one more incident worth mentioning about 6:30 pm there was an explosion in the kitchen, flying glass everywhere, fortunately nobody was near, me and lorenz on the computer were nearest....what happened we think was this...there was a glass "safety top" over the cooker...one of the kids (keisha stand up) must have twizzled the knob to full and under the glass the thing heated till it exploded, wow was there glass everywhere...nobody hurt phew...we don't even use that cooker (we use our outside kitchen all the time) and we didn't even know it was switched on, so, it was our fault we left it on for little fingers to twizzle.

Strange end to a great weekend