Fire on the beach

This is our new thing. I don't know why it took us so long to figure it out. It reminds me of bonfires on the beach in PEI when I was a kid, only smaller, and without a guitar.

Bird in our house

The bird fluttered around, then alighted on a high shelf next to a mask:

Simone tried to get it in the laundry basket. 

She succeeded (that smudge of ashen fluff is the bird)--

--but before she could get to the door it flutttered away again. Finally we nudged it out with a broom...

This guy hopped from our gate to our wall

What we are missing

(The weather report for Barnard, VT calls for snow tonight...)

Nadia turned 41 last Thursday

Those are four fingers for the tens and one for the ones...

Rice and beans for dinner...

And Harry Potter for a bedtime story. (Last Saturday.)

Simone and Erica made spring rolls last week

Thanksgiving

We went to a potluck! Heard some chanting, met some new people, talked to our friends from Quebec who were staying with us for the weekend.

sunset bouldering

Broken car!

Not sure what's wrong with it, but certainly wishing we lived in a more walkable place. At least we have a couple of bikes, so we can ride out and rent a machine somewhere...

What we do when the kids are at school

Usually we sit at home and read and write, or worry about unimportant things, but sometimes we meditate next to the pool-volleyball net:

 Sometimes we go out. We sometimes go for bike rides:

Today we did a couple of errands by bIke and then stopped by the local beach. Nadia went for a jog along the beach and had a swim:  

I sat in a shady spot and wrote:

The beach wasn't very crowded. It was nice. After we got back to the house, Nadia talked to a friend back in Boston, and I fixed our car's back door, whose handle seemed to have broken. The trick was a lot of WD-40 and some judicious prying with a screwdriver. Now I'm about to go pick up the kids from school.

Nicaragua trip, day four

A few more random pictures. This morning we went out to find breakfast. Here's the side of the Cathedral:

Here are Gabriel and I, hungry...

The bakery we had been going to was closed, so we ended up at the Garden Cafe again. The food was great, and a guy from Antwerp took our picture after Nadia took one of him and his wife:

Then we walked back across the square...

... to our hotel. I thought it was funny that the apparently old facade actually dates only from about 2004. For fifty years before that, the hotel had a pretty ugly, somewhat modernist front, all monochrome and blocky. Before the fifties, the facade was colonial-looking, but not nearly as ornately so as the current one.

In the hotel room, we packed, then paused...

And then went down to our taxi. The taxi we took this time was in pretty bad shape, and seemed to be  boiling off the water in its radiator at a dangerous rate. THe driver had to stop every fifteen mnutes or so to water the thing. At one of the stops, I took a picture of this bus, which was one of the less brightly painted buses we saw in Nicaragua. Why didn't I take a shot of a bright one?! Oh well.

The landscape was beautiful again. A lot of the ranches had windmills to pump water out of the ground for the cows to drink. (I wondered if any of them were, like the one at our place in Canada, made in Beatrice, Nebraska). You can see one in the background here:

THere were a fair number of bikes on the highway, as well as horse-drawn carts. At one point we passed a horse cart that was pulling two bikes with it: one guy, unfortunately not visible in the picture, was sitting in the cart with his bike and another was holding onto the side and letting the horse pull him. If this were the Tour de France, he'd be disqualified... 

 

We passed by the big white windmills again. There were dozens of them!

At the border, we waited while numerous forms and receipts were filled out and officially stamped. 

Then we walked the muddy road of the crossing itself:

I was carrying a big backpack, and I had a moment of wishing I had hired one of these guys to carry it:

Then on the drive back to Nosara, along the coast for a change, we passed a little place that had a house made from a shipping container. You can see it in the background here:

And then we were back, and we jumped in our own swimming pool and tried to appreciate it.

Nicaragua trip, days two and three

We talked to a lot of people and did a lot of stuff, and most of it didn't end up being photographed, but that's life. 

Gabriel skated on the street...

...and in the very large suite that the hotel moved us into after the first night:

Gabriel and I also got haircuts at a great barber shop. I hadn't had my hair professionally cut since I was about eighteen, and Gabriel had never had it done. These guys were great:

This barber shop was not super fancy, and was full of regular locals, but it too had a cool courtyard garden:

Simone bought a new hat, and did a lot of writing and drawing:

She also used the king bed (in which we all four slept!) as a gymnastics mat. Here she does a chin roll, or something:

We had good food in Granada. I liked a dish called "ropa vieja" ("old clothes") and a kind of meat tamale called a "nacatamal". Here we are at a restaurant on the main drag from the cathedral to the lake, which has been pedestrianized and yet still seems to have a fair number of Nicas hanging out on it too:

Here's some part of the main square. I'm not sure exactly why we took this picture, but whatever, it shows something:

When Gabriel and I went out looking for skate spots we saw a team or club of bikers getting ready to go out for a ride. A second after I took this picture, their support van turned up. 

In this next shot, Gabriel is like, Why are you taking another picture of us out at another restaurant? And he's right; one of the downsides of hotel living is that you have to find a restaurant for every meal. This restaurant was by the lake, which is in that width of blinding brightness past the table of other diners. 

By the afternoon of the third day the kids were tired of walking around, so we took them to a "spa" at another hotel, which had an even bigger pool than ours, and we hung out for a while:

Simone drew and wrote:

Gabriel and I played ping-pong. He won.

We also bought a bunch of stuff, including some painted clay whistles in the shapes of little birds. Women were selling them everywhere. The most common thing men sold were sunglasses. Here's Nadia trying a little whistle out, with help from Simone:

And here's Simone blowing through one herself: