Sheep Guarding Llama

What a morning.  We started our day today, which is a day without any sleep, at the airport in Managua.  We arrived before midnight and as today, the 26th, began we were working our way through the luggage drop off and security lines at the airport.  We are flying Spirit which we have never flown before and we were caught by surprise that their luggage policy is forty pounds per bag, not fifty like all of the other airlines that we use and even with rebalancing what we could we were hit with ninety dollars of overage fees.  Could not be helped.

Security was super fast and in no time we were sitting at the gate with plenty of time to kill.  The girls kind of napped a little while sitting.  Dominica was feeling pretty ill.  I spent much of the time pacing around the airport.  Everything was closed, there was no means of buying anything while we were there.  This is a very small airport and not enough business to keep anything open at night.

Our flight boarded on time, at one forty in the morning.  Everything went smoothly.  The Spirit flight, while bare bones, was roomy and nice and we did not have any issues at all.  As always it was Liesl, Luciana and I on one side of the aisle and Dominica on the other.  Dominica and I did not sleep on the flight.  Liesl had a neck pillow and was able to get an hour or two at least.  Luciana put a blanket over her head and went to sleep like a little bird.  They never used their iPads at all.

Our arrival in Houston at Bush Intercontinental was around five, right on time.  While exhausting, the red eye from Mangua to Houston is super convenient and not very full.

It is always a little bit of a shock to be back in the US.  Houston’s airport is so large and spacious, it really throws you off.  You have to do so much walking to get anywhere.  We got our bags and go through customs.  That went smoothly.  No immigration issues.

Francesca and Madeline picked us up around a quarter after six in the Sequoia.  So we were able to all load in and get all of our luggage easily.

We went to the Grices and visited for a little while.  Dominica got to working on making food for Thanksgiving.  The kids were super excited to see their cousins, they have been missing them.  After not too long I went into Garrett and Clara’s room and took a nap for about two hours.  That helped a lot.

They woke me up from my nap when it was time to head over to the Toccos’ for Thanksgiving dinner!  It is very nice that we were able to make it home in time to at least join everyone for the holiday.

It was a packed house at the Toccos’ for the holiday.  Lots of food, as always.  We brought our stuff over and moved back in upstairs just like we were over the summer and back at the beginning of the year.  We have spent a lot of time at this house this year.  Hopefully not for too much longer; after today Dominica is going to try to reach the people with whom we have rented the condo in Galveston to see if we can get in a week or two early to our condo so that we can get out of everyone’s way.

Francesca has to go to the hospital early tomorrow morning and Dominica is going to be going with her so she went back with the Grices family tonight and is spending the night over there to make things easier in the morning. So I am staying at the Toccos’ with the girls tonight.  Luciana opted to sleep alone in her room going to bed early and Liesl stayed up just a little while longer but came in with me to snuggle.

Today is Wednesday.  The day started off pretty normal.  Hot and I decided to spend a lot of the day sitting with Dominica in the lounge chairs that we have in front of the pool.  It is the spot that gets the best breeze in the house.  I worked all morning and had several meetings and calls today so needed to be on the phone for much of the day.

I had barely gotten off of my afternoon long meeting when Dominica got the tragic news from Texas and all of our plans for December changed.  We are returning to Texas as quickly as we can and we have a lot that has to be done before we can do that.

We called United, which has our tickets currently for our flight back, and while they could get us flights back to the States on Saturday that is both “too late” and they were going to charge us more than the value of the tickets to make the change.  The cost was so high that we even mentioned the possibility of the girls and me staying behind in Nicaragua while only Dominica changed her flights and us joining two weeks later!

Dominica searched and searched and managed find a light out of Managua tonight on Spirit at one forty in the morning!  It was far cheaper than changing our flights with United.  She grabbed the tickets, and I texted our house manager to see if she could get us ground transportation from Granada to Managua lined up for ten thirty tonight.

So Dominica set to packing with reckless abandon and I set out on foot to run to the bank and get the necessary cash to pay our electric bill that is due before we go.  I stop at the corner store for the last time and grab four last Kinder Sorpresa for the girls to give to them after they have helped us get ready tonight.

Dominica did an amazing job of packing under pressure.  She was basically done by nine and we actually were not under that much pressuret leading up to the ten thirty pick up by the same guy who had gotten us at the airport in Managua two months ago.

We are a bit in shock, but from why we have to travel back to Texas and also that we are leaving Nicaragua tonight.  This has been home for the last two months and we were expecting to be here for a bit longer.  We are not mentally prepared to be leaving the country yet.

At ten thirty our friend arrived and this time with a van instead of a Corolla and we easily fit in with tons of room to spare.  Dominica and I sat in the second row and the girls shared the third row behind us.  It was dark and mostly quiet as we pulled out of Granada passing by the grocery stores going back out the way that we had arrived a couple of months ago.  It is weird seeing the same trip now that everything is well known and so familiar as opposed to new and exotic and strange when we first arrived.

On the way out we had to suddenly dodge three horses in the highway.  It was pretty close.  A reminder of what life is like in Nicaragua.

Sadly, not far outside of the city, a dog ran out in front of us and we ran over it.  There was no way that our driver was going to avoid it.  He hit it so hard that Luciana was mostly out of her seat and I had to climb back and get her settled back in.  The girls didn’t really notice what had happened but it was very sobering as if the day was not sobering enough.

The trip up to Managua airport is one hour.  We had to dodge one more horse on the way.  Other than that, it was a quiet drive.

We got to the airport just before midnight.  By the time that the sun comes up we will be far to the north in Houston.  Goodbye ninety degree days, it is time for sixty degrees and rain.

Today is Tuesday.  Our time in Nicaragua is fading quickly.  We have been here for two months now but it does not feel like we have been here for very long.  These times in other countries go by so quickly.  It always feels like we have just arrived and suddenly it is nearly time to leave again.  One of our goals with making the change from Argentina to Greece that we did yesterday is to allow us to spend a full ninety days in a single location to get as much out of it as possible.  Cutting that short at all really impacts us.  When we get so little time in each location, those last few weeks really make a big difference to us.  It may seem trivial but it is huge.  We are going to try very hard to make our next trip to Europe, which is coming up really soon, as long as possible.  We are going to shoot for a full nineties days in Greece and hopefully nearly the same somewhere else.  We are kicking around the idea of Romania which is very interesting because it is not yet in the Schengen, is very low cost and the local language is very similar to Italian in speech which is very handy.

We cancelled our cruise today and found out that we are getting heavily penalized for cancelling it and it is going to cost us quite a bit of money.  Not nearly as much money as if we had not cancelled it so it is still making sense but it really sucks that we are losing so much money.  This heavily encourages me to not invest in cruising in the future.  Our lives are too difficult to reliably plan far enough in advance to have this really work as well as we would hope.

We are very excited today that MangoCon is official and is going to be September 14-17 in Rochester, New York.  So we know that we are going to be back in the US for September now.  This is a huge development and we are extremely excited.

Today is Monday, the beginning of our final stretch in the house in Granada, Nicaragua.  We are scheduled to be moving out a week from this morning around eight that morning.  There is still a small amount of confusion over if we are supposed to move out Saturday or Monday, but at the moment everyone is settled on Monday so it looks like that will be what we are doing.  The owners of the house have new people moving in on Monday afternoon and want the morning for Johanna to get the house ready for them.  So we worked out staying there Sunday night and taking off as soon as I can rent a car that morning.  Dominica booked a hotel up in Jinotega for us to spend next week.

We did some talking today and suddenly realized that all of our details plans for the upcoming year were completely made around factors that no longer existed.  When we had scheduled everything it had been because I was working at Change and we had to have certain Internet access and our changes between countries and our expensive, time consuming cruise was based on my forced vacation schedule with Change (the use it or lose it vacation policy that they enacted after I started after having made such a huge deal about their vacation rollover benefits when I was hired but taking them away before I ever got a chance to use them.)  But I am not working for Change and the need to take “vacation” from our lives really does not exist and certainly there is no need to be off of the grid or spending a fortune on a cruise or switching countries at that time or anything that we had based all of our year planning around.

Suddenly we realized that we have been continuing on a course that no longer makes sense and everything that we are planning for the next year, or even longer, should be rethought completely.  It was a head-exploding kind of day.

So we began to kick around ideas about what we could be doing instead.  We both really miss being in Europe and were not too happy with how little time we would be spending there this year and so started looking at what it would take to return there rather than going to South America.  Europe is relatively cheap while going to South America is incredibly expensive, for starters.

We kicked around a lot of ideas and after much searching Dominica found an amazing house on the Island of Crete in Greece and put in a request to find out if it is available and how much it would cost for the time that we want to be there.  The house looks amazing.  Just five hundred metres off of the Mediterranean and with lots of space for us.  An old Greek cottage that an architect has redesigned personally with a very modern interior.

We ended up getting the cottage and we are so excited that we are heading to Greece and Crete in January now!  Talk about a total change of plans.  Now our whole year and been thrown up in the air, but at least we have a place reserved in Crete.  No idea how we will get there or where we will go from there, but we have something.

This evening we watched some shows about Greece and we watched My Life in Ruins.  Luciana, out of nowhere, asked where the stuff in Greece was and when we told her she said “I want to live there!”  So she is getting her wish.  Pretty cool that that timing worked out that well.

Liesl is excited as well.  She can’t wait to see the ancient ruins and to give us a tour of them and show off her knowledge of columns.  She has been studying ancient Greece in school recently and Dominica is going to focus on that now so that she will be extra prepared for being there and get the most out of it.  Crete has the oldest ruins and longest history in all of Greece so it is a perfect place to be starting out tour of the region.

Now we have to figure out where we will go after Greece, how we will get there and back, when we can return, where we are returning to, etc.  This all gets very complicated again.

Dominica made dinner, at attempt to use what produce we have as much as possible.  There is so much still to go through and we only have one week left in our house in Granada in which to eat it and we have a fridge that is completely full of food to use up.  It is going to be rather a significant challenge to eat that much produce in that little time.  We have told our produce lady that we are going to be moving out soon and that we cannot handle any more food.  I am sure that she is sad, we have been a major source of income for her for the past two months.

We got things worked out so that we are moving out next Monday early in the morning.  We will be heading up into the mountains again to go to Jinotega and spending most of our time between our house here no longer being available and our time to return to the US up in the mountains.  We are looking forward to some cooler weather.  We have adapted well to the heat of Granada but that does not mean that we love it or that we don’t notice it still.

This evening we did family movie night and watched The Brady Bunch after putting in a bit of time searching for classic television shows that Dominica and I grew up with and finding very few – what is it about the good shows from when we were young that almost none are available in any format.  There must be people who would want to watch Who’s the Boss, Growing Pains, Happy Days, Laverne and Shirley and more.  These were very popular shows when we were young and did much to define the 1980s.  We cannot be the only people who are interested in getting to watch them and yet there appears to be no means of seeing them anywhere.  It seems like the owners of the IP simply hate their potential customers and would rather not make money on the material than see us getting to enjoy it.  It isn’t like they don’t get revenue when they put that out on Netflix, Hulu or Amazon.  We would happily watch commercials to see those shows and our kids could grow up with them and find them nostalgic and want to rewatch them as adults as well, but that opportunity, as well, is being thrown away.

Thankfully, The Brady Bunch at least is available and Liesl absolutely loved it.  We were really surprised just how much she enjoyed it.  It is a goofy show and it is from a long time ago but she was really into it.  Luciana not so much, she decided to take her iPad and go into her own room rather than watch the show with us.  Liesl had to be sent to bed once we were done with it, she would have stayed up watching it all night had we let her.