As we slept in our cabana the sound of the roosters began at about 3:30am, calling out the approaching morning. Brian has a habit of waking up with the sun and making coffee. As he goes outside to explore our gorgeous surroundings, Carter and I like to have breakfast and take things slow. Suddenly Brian yells excitedly from the garden below. He has rescued a tarantula from the swimming pool and wanted to show off his prize. I was not nearly as excited about the find.
In the mid morning Rafael (Danielle’s Papi) came to pick us up to take us all to his family’s Sunday lunch. We stopped at Danielle’s casita, to see her modest accommodations and then took the very steep, very bumpy walk down the hill to the family’s house. We walked past Rafael and Teresa’s house on down to her parent’s place where all of the family was gathering. It was filled with people. The grandparents were sitting our front porch enjoying a game of dominoes, the teens were all huddled on the couch watching TV while they had electricity and the women were all busy in the kitchen. When we arrived we were warmly greeting by everyone and Carter was immediately swept away. She went bouncing along from one person to the next, loving every minute of it.We had an amazing lunch with fresh green salad, rice, beans, bananas, avocados and just killed in our honor; guinea fowl.
Around 1pm Carter is used to going to down for an afternoon nap. She is a very happy and laid back baby, but when she gets over tired, things get ugly quickly. Right around lunch time she began to get fussy. Danielle set up a stroller in a bedroom and I went to lay her down. All of the women of the house did not understand how I could do such a thing. “She’s awake, I’ll hold her” they would say. I tried to explain that she does much better if she is allowed to sleep on her own but they disagreed. For the next hour, there was a parade of people going to check on my fussy baby. She was too distracted and entertained to think about sleep, too tired to maintain her happy disposition any longer. We needed to escape somehow.
Danielle had planned on taking us on a hike to the local swimming hole after lunch so we decided, now was the time. I knew that once Carter was in the baby carrier and away from all this activity she would sleep so we had to go. We set off into the woods; two Dominicans, 4 Americans and a sleepy Carter. All of the women at the house thought we were crazy…”don’t take the baby into the forest, leave her with us.”
Just as I predicted, Carter fell asleep in the carrier on my chest almost immediately. Which posed quite a challenge when we came across our first of 7 barbed wire fences that we would cross on our hike. With everyone’s help, I was able to safely scamper over and under each of the fences and Carter never stirred. We climbed up and down the riverbank, walking on rocks and ducking under branches. We’re not crazy, just adventurous.
After about 45 minutes, we had arrived. Joel immediately stripped down to his swimming trunks, climbed up a tree and prepared to jump off of a branch. Everyone else entered the water from a more logical location, jumping off a large rock. Carter was still asleep so we sat down to watch. I kept her covered with a shirt because Danielle mentioned that there were biting magis. I learned later that I should have been more worried about myself. I ended up with more than 50 bites on my lower legs and upper arms and Carter had 2. Luckily I squeezed each of them as I was instructed to get the poison out and they never bothered me, only in appearance. Carter did wake up and I was able to swim too, before we started our hike back.
Since we had already had the adventure through the woods, we decided to take a slightly longer route home that was out on the road. There was just enough cloud cover that it wasn’t too hot. The road was pretty quiet, just an occasional motorcycle to kick up some dust. As we were walking along, Brian noticed a large bull that was on our side of the barbed wire fence. Unfortunately, Lucy didn’t see it and got close enough to startle the bull. Lucky for us we had Shanti, Danielle’s dog with us to chase the bull away before we could get into too much trouble.
As we got closer to town, the traffic picked up and we began to see more and more people along the side if the road; socializing, sitting in front of little stores and just relaxing on a Sunday afternoon. Then up ahead we heard a lot of commotion and saw that there was a group a Haitians fighting and armed with sticks. We stopped at a safe distance and waited for the situation to disperse before we moved on to our destination.
When we finally arrived at Danielle’s Casita we visited with her housemates and waited for Rafael. We returned to our little cabana to make dinner and relax, looking out over the mountains with the beautiful blue sky and a yard full of flowers in full bloom. And that was just day one.
We had an absolutely amazing time. At 10 months old, with her big blue eyes, blonde hair and fair skin, Carter was adored everywhere we went. She didn’t mind all of the attention one bit. She started crawling for the first time in the cabana. Her first real word was established while we were there also. She said “Hi!” to every new person we encountered, often 4-5 times in a row. When we were leaving she squeaked out “Hasta Luego!” Well..…….Maybe we just imagined that part.
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