Road Trip

It sounds like our first real tropical storm will be rolling in on Tuesday.  Just as the locals have been saying, come May, the rain begins.  I don't know if I've done justice to a description of the heat yet, but as we were watching the National Weather Channel from the comfort of our air-conditioned hotel room the other day, (more on our mini vacation later)  Managua came in as the second hottest place in the world at 37 degrees Celsius, just a single degree down from New Dehli.  It is tremendously dry here.  The dirt collects in the most unsuspecting places, including the tops of door handles. When we slam the back gate on our Trooper, a dusty cloud gets hurled into the air and it reminds me of Pigpen from the Peanuts.  I'm excited for the cows.  They look so skinny right now.  All their pastures are bare and you can see them struggling to reach the lowest branch of any tree with foliage.  Soon, there will be green plants for them to munch on and the rivers will fill with water again.  Right now, the path from Chanelle's house to the beach looks like an endless moonscape.

As I mentioned, Ian and I took a mini overnight vacation to San Juan Del Sur this week.  Not nearly as sleepy as Gigante, SJDS sits in a beautiful crescent bay and has a beach lined with rickety bars including one named Pau Hana, that not surprisingly, features a Loco Moco on their menu.  We didn't take the opportunity to grace this establishment with our Hawaiian presence partially because it seemed a bit cliche for us to go there, but more so for its lack of business.  We picked a more happening joint just up from Pau Hana's that featured an upstairs deck with a nice view.  Part of the fun of our mini vacation was testing the limits of bringing dogs around Nicaragua and  I'm pleased to report that, even in the "city" of San Juan Del Sur, they continued their reign around town.  As we ate a meal of proper onion rings and homemade chicken fingers, they lazily laid at our feet without a single look of disgust from the patrons.  It really is a dream come true.  They joined us in the bookstore for an iced coffee and at the downstairs bar of our hotel room for afternoon Toñas.  We had no problem finding a room that welcomed them.  A/C and cable TV were important factors in our decision and we spent a good portion of the afternoon and all of the next morning basking in the glory of cold air and English movies.  Besides being total bums, we did take some time to visit SJDS's finest hotel called Piedras de Olas where Ian had heard that for ten dollars, you can use their infinity pools.  As my babe always says, "you know you've made it when you're sitting in a pool with the ocean in your vision."  We lapped up the sunset in luxury, sipping on margaritas and drooling over our first bites of steak in Central America.  Check out yet another, insane sunset in Nicaragua....

I finally got some good waves at Panga Drops.  We took a drive to La Vista today and walked the path from our house to the beach.  There were only two other people in the water this afternoon so I made myself balls up a little bit and got some good inside rights.  The faces weren't that long but I managed to get a handful of good drops.  I'm feeling stronger by the day and am stoked to be back in the water on a regular basis again.  Even if it's waist-high Amarillo, it's great to be riding some waves again.  

Oh yeah!  I almost forgot.  Apparently some inquiring Indigo minds wanted to know how Puna used the bathroom on the plane ride over here.  Well, on the morning of our departure, first we starved her.  Then, we deprived her of water.  Lea too.  (We didn't want her messing her kennel, even though she peed.  A lot.)  The seven and half hours to Houston she crammed herself into a very tight space between Ian's feet and the wall.  A nice gentleman on the plane gave her a small bite of chicken.  I gave her some cheese and halfway through, I let her eat some ice cubes.  When we arrived in Houston, I gave her a little bit of kibble and a bowl of water, then I took her outside and let her pee and play tennis ball.  We had to go back through security but, we didn't get hassled at all.  We had an eight hour layover in Houston and a three hour flight to Managua.  We got through Customs really fast, paid some hombre ten bucks for Lea and we were out the front door of MGA airport and into a small patch of grass which neither dog chose to use.  It wasn't until we were in the lawn of the Best Western that both dogs sprayed.  And I mean, sprayed.  Then they chased a cat and everything was normal.

Ok.  With that cleared up, more later ya'll.