My first day back to the Philippines in more than a year has so far been a wonderful trip. Seeing my wife’s immediate family here, and seeing them happy, has been pretty awesome. We started off the day today by having some breakfast at the hotel. Once we were satisfied, we left via a service for Tagaytay, PI.

We left the hotel around 8:30 am and arrived in Tagaytay around 10:00 AM — and that’s on a Sunday with no traffic! We had a pretty easy trip as we were in a very nice van with lots of A/C!!

This first picture, is a picture of the Taal Volcano, it’s considered one of the most dangerous active volcanoes in the world!!

Taal Volcano is located on the island Luzon, south of the Philippines’ captial Manila. It has been selected as one of 15 Decade Volcanoes. There is currently no Taal-homepage by the Philippine Institute of Volcanology and Seismology’s (PHIVOLCS), hence this is only an unofficial home-page (PhiVolcs’ “blessing” is indicated by a link from the PhiVolcs-www-page to this site). Aside from information on Taal, this site provides information on and translations of 19th century work of German/Austrain scientists travelling the Philippines and exerpts from the famous work of Fr. Saderra Maso, who summarized the pre-1911 activity on the basis of historical (”hard-to-get-to”) accounts.

Here is another cool view of the volcano:

Additionally while in Tagaytay, we saw a place called the “People’s Park in the Sky!” and the Picnic Grove. The People’s Park in the Sky was remarkable!! It was quite a hike up the side of a mountain, but once up there, I was able to capture some great photographs!

After visiting the Taal volcano in Tagaytay, we headed to Jolibee for lunch! Once we were full we headed out to Batangas, PI! There we actually visited a distant cousing of Vangie’s mom’s side of the family. One of the things I enjoy most when going to the Philippines is when we go visit the “locals.” I mean, it’s nice visiting Vangie’s family in Davao, but when we are Manila, it’s nice visiting other people’s home to see how differently they may or may not live.

A really nice plant inside of People’s Park in the Sky.

On the way back, we stopped at the oldest church in the Philippines, here’s a great photo!!

Just before getting to Batangas, we happened upon an amusement park, “Fantasy World!” We took a few family photos!

So far we’ve had a great time, I hope you check back as I’ll be updating this page hopefully every day with a new post!!

God Bless!

Randy & Vangie

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