I would like to say that we feel bad about swimming in an infinity pool overlooking the ocean in 82 degree weather on Christmas day while most of you are freezing in the States…..but……
The week started with another trip to Santo Domingo and the US Embassy in order to have some things notarized again. We are becoming quite the pros at getting through the Embassy and were in and out in under thirty minutes this time. While everyone there is helpful, we are hoping that is our last trip to the Embassy for a while! Once we returned to Samana, we hopped back in the car, picked up our friends that are here in Samana as well and headed over to the beach town of Las Terrenas. Las Terrenas is known for its’ eclectic population and wide variety of cultures. You can shop in the French or Spanish (as in Spain) grocery store and eat in an Italian pizzeria or a Brazilian steakhouse. The guy who owned our AirBnB was from Venezuela. So it seemed there was a new story around every corner. The town itself was much like the other towns that we have visited in the Dominican but there were a lot more specialty shops and a lot more gringos. There was an entire section where fishermen brought the catch of the day. The lobsters and crab were the largest I had ever seen! In addition to the usual chaos of cars, vans and motorcycles, Las Terrenas was flooded with people driving ATVs all around town. And yes, they drove the ATVs in exactly the same maniacal way that they drive every other vehicle on the island. The people watching was great and we spent a while just watching the world go by. We finally discovered the secret behind the Colmados. Colmados are small markets here in the Dominican and there are often half a dozen within a couple of blocks of each other. They are all named after the owner such as “Juan’s Colmado”, “Colmado Maria”, etc. We have been trying to figure out how they all survive because they range in size from a large closet to a two car garage. They have items such as a few staples (rice, beans, canned goods), a few fresh fruits and vegetables, candy, beer and a few paper products. We could not imagine how each one could possibly have enough sales volume to compete. It was explained to us that each Colmado supports a certain number of families and the families only go to one specific Colmado. For example, Bill and I might be part of Juan’s Colmado “family” and you might be part of Colmado Maria’s “family”. The Colmados will even offer credit lines to families so that they can get the staples they need that week prior to payday. In the mornings, they set up a few breakfast items or things that one might need early in the day. In the afternoons, they display the candy for the children that would stop by on their way home from school. In the evenings, they offer music and beer like a neighborhood bar. Once we understood the secret, the Colmados began to make a lot more sense to us. As we sat outside one of the Colmados watching the world, a man stopped by to sing Feliz Navidad for us which reminded us all that Christmas was just around the corner. We returned to Samana and spent Christmas Eve watching It’s a Wonderful Life (as I always do!) and woke to a beautiful Christmas day. We are planning on leaving by boat tomorrow to sail over to the national park, Los Haitises, and we will spend a few nights there with our friends who are also on their boat. We are looking forward to getting in some kayaking and cave exploring and we have heard that the area is one of the prettiest anchorages in the Caribbean. I hope that you all had a wonderful Christmas! Bundle up and stay warm and I’ll be sure and send some pictures from paradise!
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Prior to leaving Ocean World this week, we had one of the other sailors tell us that the Ocean World Marina was much like the Hotel California….every time they tried to leave, something went wrong on their boat….so you can check in anytime you like, but you can never leave. With that in the back of our minds, we readied to leave for our passage to Samana. The trip would be in several legs. First, anchor at Sosua for a few hours to wait for the time window to go to Rio San Juan. Then, anchor in Rio San Juan for the day, then overnight to Escondido and then a final early morning push into Samana. As we waved goodbye to Ocean World and made our way out of the marina, we had almost cleared the final buoy of the entrance when our low oil pressure alarm began to sound. Immediately we began to hear the strains of Hotel California playing in the background. Bill immediately checked all of the oil gauges and then crawled into the engine room to check the oil. He could find nothing malfunctioning so we determined that it must be a gremlin in the warning alarm. We took a vote and decided to head on to Sosua which was just a short jump away so we knew we could turn back if needed. We made it safely to Sosua and threw out our anchor to wait for midnight to leave for Rio San Juan. Sea conditions and wind conditions in the Dominican Republic are unpredictable so it is best to travel at night when conditions tend to be calmer. Once in Sosua, it was our anchor alarm’s time to shine. The alarm kept sounding every few minutes and we were not sure if we were dragging or if the alarm was just being “gremlined”. Dragging of an anchor is when the anchor does not dig into the seabed well enough to hold the boat in place. After a bit, we did determine that we were dragging and no amount of playing with the anchor was going to set it. So, we decided to pull up the anchor and head straight through the night and the next day to reach Escondido instead of stopping in Rio San Juan. It was not an ideal plan as it would be a long sail of about 16 hours but with the anchor not holding, we had to push on and could not stop to anchor in Rio San Juan in the dark as that would not have been safe. As I began hoisting the anchor, the Windlass (machine that hoists up the anchor when you step on a button) began making an odd noise and running in reverse! No matter what I tried, the anchor chain would pull in a bit and then scream back out. Needless to say, I made Bill take over the screaming gremlin in the Windlass. Once he took over, he determined that the anchor had become tangled on something under the water. So, we spent the next 30 minutes, in the dark, having the following fun: Bill leaning over the side of the boat with a flashlight in his mouth watching the anchor chain, then yelling back to me….turn hard starboard, then go forward….now turn hard port, then go in reverse….now port and forward….starboard and reverse….hold there….and so on and so on until he convinced the gremlin to let go of the anchor and he was able to hoist it safely onboard. Finally on our way, we waited for the next gremlin to rear his ugly little head. The night sail was amazing and the stars were unbelievable. I even took a shift on my own while Bill tried to catch a little nap which was a big deal for me in the dark! We were humming along happily until around 6:00am when we were rounding the large cape near Rio San Juan. The seas began to get rough and the ride became much less comfortable so the rest of the morning and afternoon consisted of waves beating on the side of the boat which makes for a very washing machine like churn. With no sleep, my sea sickness kicked in and I was no longer the captain extraordinaire….instead I was lying on the deck bench with my eyes closed trying not to throw up! The worst part was when we pulled into the Escondido anchorage area and the washing machine continued to churn…no rest for the weary but at the least the anchor held! We tried to get a few hours sleep without much luck. We started the final leg into Samana around 1:00am. Luckily, the anchor pulled up cleanly this time…unluckily, the gremlin decided to move into our auto pilot system causing the system to beep loudly for no apparent reason! Bill managed to get the system back on track and as we rounded the last cape, the seas laid down and became as smooth as glass. Seasick Sally managed to get a few hours of sleep while poor Bill soldiered on with no sleep. Pulling into Samana Bay just before sunrise was an amazing feeling….and much like childbirth, the previous miserable 24 hours were soon forgotten as the sun rose over the clouds welcoming us to our new place of discovery.
In Samana, we are staying at the Puerto Bahia Marina….which is amazing! It is a five star resort and once again, due to the Stupid, we have the place almost to ourselves.! I feel like Elizabeth Taylor again and the resort even has an infinity pool that overlooks the Samana Bay! I can think of far worse places to spend Christmas! We are looking forward to exploring this part of the country which has beautiful waterfalls and a national park where some of the scenes from Jurassic Park were filmed. I will do my best to take some amazing pictures for you! In the meantime, Feliz Navidad from the Dominican Republic! The week began with a trip to the local Del Oro Chocolate Factory. As with most things in the Dominican, a simple trip to the chocolate factory is never quite as simple as it should be. First, I had to locate their website to determine if they were doing tours during The Stupid. Easy enough plan but the website did not have any of the usual opening/closing, times, etc on it. I finally located the Contact Us page which consisted of an email and a Whatsapp contact number. For those of you not familiar with Whatsapp, it is an app by Facebook that allows you to text and make phone calls (quite handy given the sketchy phone service here). The Dominicans live on Whatsapp and it also works well for us because it is easy to translate from one language to another. So, I contacted Jennifer from the Chocolate Factory on Whatsapp and she quickly responded that the tours were open. She wanted to know when we would like to come and I responded that I needed to work out some transportation before I could sign up for a tour time. Also in true Dominican style, her next text was a contact for a friend of hers that could give us a ride. Not only could he take us to the chocolate factory but he could taxi us anywhere we needed to go. So now, we have our own personal taxi guy named Victor with much less than taxi prices! Our day with Victor included six stops in 6 hours which totaled about $30.00 for the day.
Victor picked us up right on time and it did not take us long to figure out that Victor’s English was actually worse than our Spanish (and that is saying a lot!). However, between using Whatsapp to translate and a lot of gestures, we all managed to get our point across. First, we wanted to go the rum factory but when we arrived, they were not doing tours. So, off we went to do our regular chores such as the paint store and the boat shop. Bonus of having a personal driver is that Victor generally would come into the store with us to speak to the clerk. Exceptionally helpful when you are looking for industrial paint and have no idea how to say that in Spanish! One thing that we have noticed is that in the Dominican, if you are white, that means you must like country music. Since arriving in the larger cities and being in several taxis, it has been quite entertaining to find that as soon as we get in the car, the driver turns off the Dominican music and turns on American country music. Every time! That is fine with me, of course, because I love country but I chuckle at the other Gringos who must be suffering through all of their taxi rides! We arrived at Del Oro and were treated to a private tour. Their factory is small but they manufacture every item for their chocolate including all of the wrapping. The most shocking part was that they still hand wrap each and every candy bar as well as the little sample coins! I can not imagine the patience and time that must take. At the end of the tour was a glorious shop filled with chocolate bars, hot cocoa mix, cocoa beauty products….anything that you could possibly make out of cocoa. The fact that Bill did not have to drag me out of the store is pretty impressive if I do say so myself! Now for the not so fun part of the week….rain! We have been very spoiled since we have been here because we have only had a few days of rain and the showers usually only last a few minutes and then we are back to sunshine. Not so this week. In the infamous words of Winnie the Pooh….the rain, rain, rain came down, down, down. When I was fifteen years old, I bought two goldfish and I named them Rhett and Scarlett. Like most things when you are fifteen, Rhett and Scarlett were soon forgotten except to toss them some fish flakes every so often. My sister and her boyfriend affectionately nicknamed the fish Mold and Mildew…and that was their name until the day they died. Well, this week, Bill and I felt like Mold and Mildew. I am sure you envision being on a boat in the rain as a romantic, comfy, cozy place. Hmmm. Take that vision, remove the romantic, comfy and cozy and add in water leaking from every crevice and there you have it! You never know where a leak is on a boat until it rains. And the leaks constantly change. Once a rainstorm comes, you find the leaks and fix them. Excellent. Until the next storm when new leaks have arisen. This week, the main issue was that several of our rubber gaskets on the hatch window had rotted in the sun. The hatch window is over our bed. So, neither comfy nor cozy…..just wet! Bill compared this particular leak to Chinese water torture….drip, drip, drip and never on the same body part twice! After several attempts at avoiding the drips, I shifted up to the settee and slept. Poor Bill just tortured on through the drips. The mast also decided to spring a leak. We had run some wires for the solar panels down the mast and I had taped them thoroughly with duct tape and a mast boot. Or I thought it was thorough. By the third day of rain, we no longer had any dry towels so I would pick the least wet one to place under the mast. Each time there was a break in the rain, we would run and try to solve one of the leaks before it started raining again. Happy to report that we think we are all dry now….at least until it rains again! We are now watching weather closely to determine when we can begin our move down to Samana, DR. We were hoping for tomorrow but the wind and waves are not cooperating so we will be hanging out until conditions improve. At least it is not raining anymore! I am sure that Mold and Mildew are watching over us from their big toilet in the sky enjoying their revenge on me….let’s just hope that we don’t hear a flush! Have a wonderful week and here’s hoping your last minute Christmas shopping goes well! We have returned from our Thanksgiving Tour 2020! It was a bit like being on the Amazing Race because we covered two countries, five states and ten cities over a two week period. We were quite busy but we got to visit with just about all of the family which was the goal of the trip. Traveling back to the States from the DR went more smoothly than we thought it would. This trip was our first venture back to the States since leaving and given the added fun of “the Stupid” (as we have lovingly name Covid), we expected the worst. We have been in taxis, buses, planes, trains, trucks and cars but we made it! Our biggest unknowns were the bus ride to Santo Domingo and immigration both leaving and arriving back to the DR. The bus ride from Puerto Plata to Santo Domingo was unknown number one. For the whopping cost of $8.00 a ticket for a 4 to 5 hour trip, I expected a run down school bus that we would need to push most of the way to Santo Domingo. Au Contraire! The bus was a top of the line tour bus complete with movies, air conditioning, wifi and cell phone chargers! I would go so far as to say that our Caribe Tour bus was better than our airline! From the bus station, we took a taxi to our Airbnb and then headed out the next morning to the Santo Domingo Airport. Everything went smoothly until we reached immigration. At that point, the negotiations began! The immigration agent would say that we owed a fee. I would pull out a receipt to show that the fee had been paid. Then, she would find another fee. Pull out receipt. Then, she walked us over to another guy who said that we should not have paid our fee at the marina but it needed to be paid at the airport. Receipt and smile and comment of “well, we did pay it at the marina so….”. Stare the man down. Smile again. He finally shrugged, grumbled something about someone at the marina losing their job and stamped the passports for us to board the flight.
Once we landed in Fort Lauderdale, we began what came to be known as Food Tour 2020. I had forgotten how many billboards there are in the States and each one we passed, I would point and say, “Oh! Oh!” leading Bill to make a list of my must eat restaurant chains including Outback, Dairy Queen and Waffle House. We ate breakfasts, brunches, lunches, dinners and snacks. I could not believe that I had forgotten how amazing a DQ Blizzard could be! We also had a bit of sticker shock with the current food prices in the States especially after the low cost of living in the DR. I am not sure when a Blizzard and an order of cheese curds went to a little over $8.00 but that needs to stop! All in all, we enjoyed our food tour but I think it best that we did not stay a month or I would have put on an easy 10 pounds! Seeing both sides of the family was fun and this year, we had the added pleasure of meeting Bill’s newest grandson. He was a very happy little guy and his two newest words were “cheers” and “shit” much to his mother’s dismay and his grandfather’s delight. We also enjoyed seeing Bill’s other grandson and daughter as well as the sons-in-law before leaving to visit Bill’s mom. I love going to Bill’s mother’s house. It is on beautiful Amelia Island and his mom loves to read so I always get a list of updated must reads. I also get Frosted Flakes! Who doesn’t love a house on an island with Frosted Flakes? We were glad to find his mother in excellent health and back to her weekly book clubs and bridge playing. It was nice to see her and her friends getting back to some normal activity at last. We left Florida to venture to Georgia where we had dinner with Bill’s sister and her family prior to heading to my family. Thanksgiving is my family’s biggest holiday each year and we all look forward to Mom’s cooking and a day full of games. Well, this year, my mother decided that the Saturday before Thanksgiving would be a swell time to have emergency gallbladder surgery. Bill was grateful for her timing because otherwise, he would have been scrambling to figure out a way to get me off of the boat and on a plane back home. So, needless to say, that unexpected event started the week off with a bang. When mom was discharged from the hospital, she was instructed to “take it easy” (not easy for my mother) and “just go home and boss everyone around” (very easy for my mother). For those of you who know me well, you are probably beginning to glean what my next few days looked like and the horror of it all….for all parties concerned! Mom sitting in a chair in the kitchen attempting to give me directions on how to cook Thanksgiving side dishes. Thank goodness my sisters and brothers-in-law were in charge of the main courses which only left me with macaroni and cheese (not out of a box….) and a dessert/salad recipe that my mom found on the internet. My son, Everett, had arrived by this time and his hospitality degree had thankfully included a cooking class so he was able to jump in and save me from my mother’s eye rolls several times! All in all, we sisters were quite proud of pulling off Thanksgiving and mom did a stellar job playing the big boss….as my younger sister stated, “Nothing new about that!” The next few days, Bill headed to Biloxi with his friend for a casino “fix” and I headed to Charleston to see Kaarin. She could not come to Thanksgiving because her neighbor had been diagnosed with The Stupid. Kaarin wasn’t sure if her friend that she had visited had been exposed or not, so with my mother being fresh out of the hospital, we decided it best that Kaarin not come to Atlanta (turns out her friend tested negative for The Stupid but results were too late for Kaarin to drive to Atlanta). Kaarin had to work all weekend so I hung out at the restaurant and watched her work like a dog….not bad for a girl who never cleaned her room! When Bill and I returned to Atlanta, the weather had decided to get bitterly cold which meant our departure could not come soon enough! We stayed in a hotel near the Atlanta airport since our flight left first thing in the morning. Our entertainment at the hotel was when Bill opened the ice bucket and found several boxes of condoms hiding…..we figured the guy’s wife must have knocked on the door which warranted the secret stashing! The flights back to the DR went smoothly and we had no problems with immigration at all so Unknown Number 3 passed without issue. When we arrived in customs, we had a box filled with necessities from the States (ie white duct tape, Velcro, coloring books and crayons for the local children, etc). The customs agent asked what was in the box and then indicated that we needed to place the box on the conveyor belt to be scanned. As Bill placed the box onto the belt, we noticed that the scanner girl was turned around backwards in her seat talking to a colleague. We watched as our box made its way up the conveyor belt, through the scanner and out the other side. Bill picked up the box and we walked away…..not once had the scanner girl turned around and noticed that we, or our box, were there…..amazing how getting into the DR was much easier than getting out! So, we are back on Galt and were welcomed by Ocean World’s ‘Who let the dogs out’ sea lion show as if we had never left. Now we wait for our next weather window to head around the island to Samana where we hope to play tourists once again! Have a wonderful week, keep your gallbladders in place and whatever you do….do NOT look in the ice bucket at your hotel! |
AuthorSally Miller Archives
May 2024
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