Our intention had been to spend the morning in the pools and then head off again but we slept in and were expecting a phone call AND I had still not seen my sisters wedding so was desperate to get somewhere with an internet connection.
We packed up and sadly waved at the steaming pools (which were a funny green colour if Im honest and I wasn’t so upset about not getting in!) and hit the road yet again!
I know that these last few blogs may be starting to blend together with absolutely no sign of a wedding but please bear with us. We have such a long way to go in such a short period of time. We covered such huge distances in Canada and America without a problem but the roads here are so different and small distances take so long. The GPS has no freaking clue where we are most of the time and we spend a lot of time lost in the middle of nowhere. I really hope you can stick with us while we get to a location where we can settle for a while to get to know a few people and get ourselves a wedding arranged!
Hopefully this blog will lift your spirits as the experience did ours!

Our phone call didn’t come and there was nowhere to get online so…again, we carried on regardless. Peggy was still a little slow but we were climbing all the time so it was hardly surprising. We were on route to a Monarch butterfly sanctuary! For those of you who watched the LIFE series with my hero David Attenborough you will have a better idea as pictures will never do this amazing spectacle justice!
We drove through tiny villages littering the streets, we dodged chickens and children in the roads and swerved around the topes and potholes (all while podding peas) to get to 5,000 ish feet to the El Rosario sanctuary.
The nearer we got the less we could believe our eyes. The sky was filled with butterflies. We parked up and watched them as we grabbed our lunch before setting off to see the sanctuary.
We fought off the children selling their wares and offering to look after the van while we were gone, we declined at least 15 people selling walking poles and made our way into the forest.
As we cant read Spanish we didn’t know what to expect and just followed the few people that arrived as we did. We walked through a tiny dust village with stalls at either side selling everything from hand knitted hats and gloves (it is 80 degrees!) to butterfly fridge magnets to corn on the cob. The dust hill was steep and as always we wore our all terain flip flops and shorts for the climb.
We made it through the village and the storm of huge wasps that were everywhere… and then we saw the steps.
Up and up and up…the small crowd parted, we paid and off we went. It took us an hour to get up what must have been 1500 steps and certainly 1500 feet, through a field of horses saddled for the ride down and up another dust brush path to get to probably the most amazing thing I have ever seen.
Thousands and thousands of Monarch butterflies fluttered above and around us and turned the trees orange in the glinting sunlight. The peace up there was ethereal even with people around us all watching this surreal vision in front of them. It stopped us in our tracks and all of the pictures we had taken on our trek up were worthless. The butterflies landed on us as we stood watching and it was like being in another world completely.
The butterflies winter here and during the other seasons travel as far as Canada. They go through several generations during their trip yet every winter they return to these very mountains.

I dont think anyone in the world can watch the nature programmes and not wonder at the strength, intelligence and commitment of these and other creatures and not be inspired and awed by them. There is no way to explain how much this experience ultimately surpasses seeing it on a screen.
I will never forget the peace I felt there, it is like nothing else I have ever felt. We stood there in silence, our mouths gaping and soaked up the atmosphere. We watched and took pictures and eventually HAD to head back down the mountain.

The sun was dropping and it was so different going down, there were no wasps and no butterflies. We had caught just the right time to see them all landing for the night. The trip down was a quiet one and we made it back to Peggy, and went to find a campsite.
The camp in the book was yet again closed but luckily a family next door let us camp in their garden…and yes, they had dogs!

Find out what happens next on our traveling wedding adventure!