Hope you had a fantastic holiday!!

We hope everyone had a great Christmas. We had a very quiet couple of days (well as quiet as you can get with Dominican music blaring all around).

On Christmas Eve, we started out with a fantastic couple of hour walk down the beach from Cabarete to Encuentro. Then we headed over to our friend's home in the evening. As many of you know we don't have a car down here so we had to decide how to get to our friends home on the other side of town. We had wine, champagne, mashed potatoes, stuffing, ice cream, chocolate & a large toy golf club set to take with us so we needed two backpacks to carry it all in.

Well we decided to take a moto concho. For those of you not familiar with a moto concho, it consists of a Dominican on a motorcycle (who may or may not have an actual license) and you just hop on the back and off you go (and I do mean OFF you go). As soon as we approach the entrance to our apartments, we are constantly whistled at and harrassed by the moto conchos. We shook our heads yes and they arrived in seconds. Well, I climbed on first and then Matt climbed on behind me (keep in mind with two backpacks and a plastic set of golf clubs for Luna) on a one person moto.

The little town that we live in has had its roads completely torn up as they have laid sewer pipe so it was quite a bumpy ride through town and to make it worse, we could not see the bumps coming. So after hearing Matt say Owww many times (did I mention he was sitting on the luggage rack), we finally arrived at our friends community. We were very glad to make it to their house without having a backpack full of garlic mashed potatoes.

Well, Christmas day was a bit quieter with no wild moto rides just a wild kite ride. The wind was decent so we hauled our kites (yep, even mine) down to the beach to kite for a bit. Matt helped me launch my kite and I flew it on the beach for a bit. The wind was really gusty so my kite kept stalling (yep, gotta figure out how to make it stop that). Basically, it would be flying just fine, then get hit by a gust of wind to be followed by a huge gap of wind. Well, that means it falls out of the sky - NOT A GOOD THING... Well, one time, I didn't recover well at all and Matt and I both went flying. He was holding onto the back of my harnass and digging in his feet while I bounced multiple times before we both ended up in a pile on the sand. No injuries, but I learned my lesson and got much better at recovering the kite when it stalled. One wild ride was enough!!

So maybe it wasn't so quiet but it was very good. We missed all our friends and family but managed to talk to our family on Christmas. And I still managed to watch my favorite Christmas movie, Christmas Story, on TBS multiple times.