Saturday. We were all super tired this morning. Paul had taken the dogs last night as he was home long before Dominica and I were and the dogs like to go to bed early (like around seven thirty or eight.) Liesl and Luciana had stayed with the dogs down in Dominica and my room while we were out in León, but he took them to bed when he got back hours before we did. So they were super needy this morning and wanted to spend the entire day hanging out with me.
So it was really a “dog day” for me. I pretty much got stuck in my room with the dogs for the entire day. If I did anything else Mia would be mostly okay, but Clive would just whine and look at me sadly until I returned and snuggled him. So I was napping and on my phone for a lot of the day. Not a bad way to spend a Saturday.
Dominica had to bake this morning as there is a birthday at the hotel today and she is making the cakes. That took nearly all of her morning. The kitchen teams wants her to teach them how to bake. Apparently not many people here know how to bake things like cakes.
I did try to go out for a nice walk today to get some exercise and as soon as I made the attempt the dogs demanded that they come with me. So no luck on my plans. I did already have the GoPro set up to take with me, however, so I strapped it on anyway and did a time lapse of walking the dogs. Not a long walk because there were just too many cars and it was exhausting to manage the dogs, traffic, and the camera all in the middle of the day. Not the best footage, but it is interesting and gives something of a view of the area around the hotel.
The caterer for Dominica’s upcoming birthday party gala at the hotel stopped by today. Yes, we are catering an event at our own hotel and restaurant because we are shutting it all down so that all of the staff can attend, along with all of our staff from Managua and Matagalpa. So we are expecting quite a lot of people as most everyone will be bringing spouses and kids. We are setting up the parilla on the beach and Paul will be BBQing. That event is in eleven days, just two days before Allen gets here. Next week is going to be super busy around Las Peñitas.
Luciana and I were talking today and she is really feeling the itch to get traveling again. It was such a big part of her developmental years, the lack of traveling now is really noticeable to her. This is a little weird, of course, because we just traveled all over the US from Dallas to New York to Orlando to Miami and then flew down to Nicaragua and now we are here in Central America where in some ways every day feels like traveling, of course. But we have been here for three months now, and we rarely leave the village and when we do it is only to go to León so Luciana has already developed a very strong feeling of Las Peñitas just being “home” and not qualifying as travel in any sense.
The two places that Luciana has expressed really wanting to go are to Guatemala where she wants to visit some amusement parks (they have big water parks and a big dinosaur park up north) and to return to Spain and Greece both of which we lived in so long ago that she does not remember that much about them.
There is a small waterpark in León that we hope to be able to take the girls to soon. And there is a small dinosaur park near Managua that we need to try out. Luciana is very interested in spending more time back in Managua. In her words she really enjoys “modern cities”. She things that San Salvador, San Jose, and Tegucigalpa look interesting. She is hopeful that for our visa renewal that we will go spend some time in San Jose so that she can explore the city. I am as well, I think that we would enjoy a city break and there should be a number of museums to hit, too.
Right now, our plan is that we will be down there in mid-September.
Tonight we had a mini birthday party for our new head chef. We waited until the restaurant had closed and did singing and cake around nine. Everyone really liked the cake, it is not the kind of thing that you really find here very much.
We went to bed relatively early tonight. Tomorrow Paul, Dominica, Ivonne, and Leo have to go to Managua. We are exchanging the broken washing machine (we have owned it only three months) for one that works (Dominica is pretty annoyed that no one listened to her about not buying a Whirlpool and it broke in weeks and Whirlpool has absolutely no idea how to fix it already) and buying a second (non-Whirlpool) washing machine so that we have extra capacity and a backup unit for when the main one inevitably fails again (in a few weeks, probably.) They will leave around nine in the morning. Tomorrow is Sunday so our busiest day of the week and the hardest day for us to use the restaurant ourselves so a good day for everyone to be gone. I’ll be staying home with the kids and the dogs and getting some writing done.