July 12, 2015

The morning began as I heard a gentle knocking on my room door and Tiffany poked her head in.  We sat and talk for a while – 25 years or so in the making, then the conversation continued downstairs in the kitchen as she presented homemade bread she had made for us and some guava marmalade.  She had also brought some delicious fresh ground Costa Rican coffee grounds and showed me the Costa Rican sock coffee maker.  

I woke the tired kids up (“Wake up, kids!!  We’re on vacation!!” <grin>) and soon Nate and Kevin came over.  We started walking into town.  Our first stop was the PADI scuba shop.  We were being scheduled for a dive when…it was discovered PADI didn’t have our certification information registered.  NOO!!!  It can’t be!  Fortunately, I had our diving instructor’s number on my phone and we called him in the States.  Diving over 35 years and thousands of certifications and this was the first time he had encountered a place where the temporary cards were not sufficient, but he spoke to them and the dive was scheduled <happy face>.

We walked around the village of Dominical and out to the beach.  Market stands are set up here everyday for craftspeople to sell tourists their wares.  Many are factory made in Costa Rica somewhere, but a few stands have very unique crafts made right there.  We walked to a restaurant for lunch and enjoyed delicious food and Ethan and Mags had smoothies from heaven.  As we ate, a developmentally delayed young man walked near us and to a table in the house connected to the restaurant.  He went to the table and picked up scissors, contently starting to snip pieces of paper.  The kids decided to go swimming, so Kevin left and Tiffany and I headed to the beach and talked about friends from high school and long-agos.        

      

We dropped all the kids off at Rio Lindo to swim while we headed to the local Super Mercado so I could pick up food and milk for us, then we stopped by again, but the kids were swimming happily.  It was decided they could easily walk home in an hour, so we went back to the house.  A loud explosion of thunder following a blinding course of lightening brought on a heavy rain which soon created a small river of the roads.  Kathy from Rio Lindo called Tiffany and asked if the kids were still supposed to walk home.  Of course not!  Tiffany  left in their Suzuki Samurai (and yes, I did drive in it – despite my last Samurai trip changing my life long ago).

 

The plan had been to have Tiffany cook a dinner for us, but we discovered, when she returned with the children, that the electricity was out.  We waited for a couple of hours, but I was so tired that it was decided we would try another night.  The kids and I readied ourselves for bed and played a game of Farkle, which was becoming our evening tradition.  The kids and I ended up having such an incredible, memory making (for me) conversation about their wedding dreams/desires and life in general.  It was so very beautiful, yet I had to end it when I could carry on no longer as I was so very tired.         

Pictures: The Costa Rican coffee maker; Dive maps and a GD parking sign at the PADI center; Maggie enjoying her smoothie; Swimming at Rio Lindo with Nate, Tiffany's son; Ethan trying to catch a gecko in the house we rented.