House Trip

One of the perks of being a homeroom teacher is that I get to go on house trips with the boys I teach. This year they decided to go to the Northeast coast to a deserted beach called Playa Rincon. It took us four hours to get there and I am very glad we actually did make it there. You'd think driving down narrow mountain roads you'd drive carefully, but not our driver. H e basically had two speeds: braking hard or accelerating.
Once we made it to the beach we set up camp and went swimming, it was so hot. Don't let the beautiful pictures fool you. As you may have guessed by now, there is always a down side to living in the Dominican. The downside here is the warm salt water and the sandfleas. It's so hot that all you want to do is go swimming but once you get in, you're covered in salt water and it's not even refreshing. Then when you get out, the salt makes you sticky and you're terribly itchy because of the bugs in the sand. Luckily, there was a fresh water pool of water that we could walk to and clean ourselves off in.
After two nights with leaky tents we came back home for one night and then off to Santo Domingo the next day. We went shopping along a closed street where all the store owners kept saying "cheapy cheapy". You could buy larimar and amber in a lot of the stores. Also tacky Dominican souvenirs (you'll have to wait for Christmas for those). We stayed in a hostel that night and then stopped at some underground caves on our way home. They were called Tres Ojos "Three eyes". It was actually four pools of water, but very neat.
I really enjoyed spending time with the boys outside of school. It was very interesting to see how they'd do outside of the structure of the school. Unfortunately, not so well. The manners I thought they had stayed at the school.
Terry was glad to have me home finally, he was way behind in his grading. Here are some pictures of the beach, sorry, no waterfalls this time.












Oh yeah, guess what I found when I got back home?

My bag!!! 10 weeks later it found it's way back to me from who knows where. It was a whole lot dirtier and some stuff was missing but nothing too important. It's great just to have all my clothes again.
Here's a picture of what Terry got from me for his birthday.