Sunday. I took the dogs out for their walk this morning, but we had not gone even a mile before people starting setting off morning fireworks! So it was a full sprint back to the hotel with two terrified little dogs that were nearly pulling me off of my feet the entire way back. That was no fun.
The hotel was pretty busy even first thing this morning. We had a lot of tables for breakfast. We started out on the edge of the beach instead of at our usual table because some drunk girl had wandered in off of the street and passed out at our table. So we sat on the beach while she was removed. Then we moved to our own table because it is a lower priority table that we use so that we don’t take up the premium spots on the beach when the guests start to file in.
Sua, the giant restaurant just up the street from us, is still closed today, which I really can’t believe. Being closed Monday through Thursday is no big deal, even they probably don’t make any real profits for those days. And Friday is a shoulder day. Being closed on Saturday was bold, it would be seriously scary to be closed on a Saturday. But Sunday, on a holiday weekend. My gosh, that is huge. This is the busiest day for a month or two, at least. Being closed today is the worst possible timing for them.
Saeed came by this morning looking for someone to drink with. So I joined him as he ordered bloody Mary’s and I got mojitos. Eventually Dominica and Paul were drinking too. There were tequila shots, whiskey shots, it was a very relaxing morning. We hung out until nearly noon.
This afternoon I worked on my final DuoLingo achievement. The “Finishing #1 in Diamond League” badge, the hardest one to get. It has taken me about a year of trying to finally get that one. I had to put in about three hours of completely focused work on DuoLingo today to make that possible. It feels great to finally have all of that done and out of the way. Now I just need to finish the stories and lessons without any specific goals.
The hotel is so busy today. Totally sold out, but that is easy with the very few rooms that we have. But the restaurant had over fifty patrons in it for most of the day. That’s insane. That is standing room only around here. I hid in the office as much as I could all day. There is no way not to just be in the way with that amount of stuff going on.
This evening a storm rolled in. And it was a big one. Really bad timing with us having a full restaurant as the roof on the beach side is just awful and useless in a strong rain. It is the first big thing to get replaced once we fully own the hotel. But the challenge there is that we really want to move that to two floors instead of just one because we desperately need the additional seating capacity as the restaurant has just gotten to be crazy. The challenge, though is that it will then mean that there is a restaurant right off of one of the hotel room private balconies. We have not figured out how to deal with that problem, yet.
The storm was really intense and really terrified the dogs. We had to spend about eight hours trying to keep them calm. They really do not handle the intense storms here well.
To make the evening even more exciting, the new septic system failed from the massive onslaught of the biggest rain of the season and we actually had things flowing the wrong direction. So it turned into a plumbing emergency during a huge storm. Not a great situation.
And then, just to make things harder, the power went out. Not surprising as the storm was incredibly intense. So intense that we were afraid to go to generator power for quite a long time before there was so much lightning.
The staff worked so hard today, we got them pizza from Puesta and I got salmon toast for Luciana. Josue and I had to go pick it up in the pouring rain while wading through several inches (up over my ankles) in sludge running down the road. The water on the road was up to our hotel entrance level.
It was a wild night. Our maintenance team, not just Wilbur, was here much of the night figuring out what to do. There is going to be a lot more work going on tomorrow, for sure.
One of the big problems that caught us tonight is that the new roof is not on yet, nor the gutters put in. Because of that all of the water coming down in that space is going straight into the septic system instead of running into the street like it normally would. That is a high priority item for tomorrow.