Good Morning! 

Sitting here in the living room of our condo, doors open to a view of the Pacific, listening to the breeze blow the waves in, landing with a crash on the shore…pinch me…

So we left this little story in the Atlanta airport yesterday evening. This is a busy place. Planes coming and going on a regular basis.

The flight from here to Managua was the longest in our hop, skip and jump at 3 hrs and 16 min…Arlene timed it lol.

A little turbulence, but nothing crazy. Saw some lightening in the clouds in the distance. I had never seen that from above before! 

Basically had the one meal in Atlanta for the whole day. The rest were the ginger ale and snacks on the plane. Which is ok, since we were sitting pretty much all day.

Landed in Managua around 8:40 CDT. They are in the same time zone as we are so no big adjustment there.

For me, the stressful part is getting through customs and all the paperwork dealing with agents that don’t speak English. More than a little paranoia creeps in.

Another lesson learned were the “helpers” that want to carry your bags for you. They’re dressed sharp enough. Cost me a bit of money though. They just jump in and grab your luggage. Then turn around with their hand out. I have to learn to walk away. I think they’re pretty good at catching bleary eyed rookies like me LOL.

Much to our pleasure, the guy who met and picked us up was the original guy Pat was going to send. His name is Osman. Super guy! He’s a naturalist and has been giving tours since he was 11. Went to school and I’ll say his English is WAY better than any Spanish I know. He’ll be putting some ideas together for site seeing. 

He’s married to a gal from Idaho of all places. They speak only the native Spanish in their home. 

It’s a two hour ride from the airport to the resort on roads that are mostly under construction. The last 8 km, as Pat warned, were pretty rough. However, it gave us ample time to talk about Nica, it’s customs and history. They are working on having it paved in some manner. With all the development planned for the area, that will be a must.

December is a big here. The majority of the population is Catholic and as such, they have a huge celebration coming to honour the virgin Mary. That’s happening this coming weekend. He took us down one street which was really lit up in preparation for that day. He said families or groups of people would walk up and down the street singing at the various displays and homes and receive gifts or candy. Kind of a mixture of Halloween and Christmas.

Here is a much better explanation from Rick Steves. ttps://www.ricksteves.com/watch-read-listen/nicaragua-pure-joy-in-a-humble-land

Rick Steves is a travel guide we’ve followed for a number of years. Always interesting to us. Goes off the beaten path and explains a lot of the history of areas he gives advice on.

The pictures shown here are all taken with a smart phone while driving. We did a bit of a photo walk along the beach this morning. I’ll post those later.

That’s all for now…

Cheers!