While Jim and Janet took a walk down to the marina, my art group met at Nancy's house on the Caracol, the area of nice homes up on the hill where we lived two years ago. Nancy's house is just fantastic. I think it is right at the top of the neighborhood and has a 360 degree view of San Carlos from the rooftop, where there is a hammock swinging from a palapa and a hot tub. The views are outstanding!
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| The Bahia from Nancy's House |
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| Views towards San Francisco Beach and our little bay in front |
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This was the scene I painted, though I still
have work to do on it. It is in a courtyard, out
of the wind. The reason I ended up here is that
I was going to paint the Bahia but just after I
got all my paint on the palette, a wind came
up and blew the palette and all the paint on
my leg-I was very colorful and lost some
valuable time! |
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| View to the marina below |
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| Nancy painted this gorgeous picture of her courtyard. Puts me to shame! |
We signed up for a tour of a farm in San Jose with neighbors. We had never seen one of these (below). Do you know what they are?
Those are dragon fruit. In the last picture, you can see how they grow, with close ups above. Included in the tour of the Dragon Fruit Farm was a bar with tequila, rum and vodka with which you could make a cocktail and a tasting of dragon fruit. We then had a walk through the orchards and then took off for a tour of the Giant Cactus Forest and a nearby Dairy Farm. We returned for a fantastic lunch of beef tacos with pico de gallo and a homemade hot salsa. The second course was grilled shrimp skewers and another fish dish (I can't quite remember now) on a bed of rice. We had dragon fruit ice cream for dessert (which is great with a little tequila in it!)
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| Greg and Elizabeth at work in their kitchen. |
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This is a portable freezing cart. Greg, the owner,
pours a puree of the dragon fruit (and I think cream and
sugar) onto the cart and it gradually freezes into ice cream. |
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We all took turns turning it as it froze.
Greg and his wife, Elizabeth own the farm
and show up at the local outdoor market
on Saturdays. She sells their organic
veggies and he makes the ice cream and
sells the fruit. |
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| An Osprey greeted us on our way into the Cactus Forest |
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| Our tour group |
After walking through the Cactus Forest, we visited a dairy farm out in the country.
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| We were greeted by this rooster-loved his coloring! |
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| The dairy farm where they board horses and have several cows and chickens |
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They make cheeses in a small shed on the property. The curds are
in the pot on the left. |
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| The stove |
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Today they were making two kinds of cheeses, neither name did I
recognize but one was like ricotta and the other like a chihuahua cheese. |
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| We were offered tastes of each, which were wonderful. |
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| The dairy farmer enjoying our delight at his cheeses |
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Back home again, we enjoyed watching
the egrets and pelicans preening and catching
fish. |
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| The moon just coming up |
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This is probably what the birds were after....
Sardine? Mackeral? |
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And walked over to Palapa Griega for a night of Mark
Mulligan's singing |
For Thanksgiving, we went out to Diane and Joe's ranch in the desert for the afternoon of mixing and munching and a tad of imbibing before the Norteno band showed up and we all danced to the music.
Later, we went over to Joe and Margene's with other friends for a sit down turkey dinner with all the trimmings. It was a grand day!
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| Deja and Jennifer with selfie |
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| Some of the guests and Joe, our host with his arms folded |
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This man was very dapper and we made it a point to introduce
ourselves to him. It turned out that he is Hugo Delgado, Señor
Caballero, the founder of the town, designated Hugo to do all
the development of San Carlos. He was a fabulous conversationalist. |
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Mixing with Jackie, Phil and Harry. Jackie, unbelievably, is from Boulder.
She works for the Denver Center, making costumes. She is also a member
of the art group when she is in town. |
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| The band |
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| Dancing |
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| Diane and Joe with a few of us dancing a circle around them |
We walked to the beach one day to hear Sector 7, enjoy the day and each other's company-including Boo!
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| Boo is going to miss those Janet scratches! |
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| On the way home after sunset. |
If you remember from my last blog, we had a trimaran sailboat in our bay below our house two different times and noticed the man coming into shore on his dinghy while we were at Palapa Griega. When we were walking back, he was returning from town (visiting neighbors of ours, we later learned) and we stopped to talk to him. What was quite funny was that Janet and I had been making up all kinds of stories about him and what he was doing alone in a trimaran on our little bay. The story was one you could never have made up. It turns out that his name is Dale Dagger. He is a bachelor (we guess) surfer who started out in California, and other surfing locales over the years, finally ending up in Nicaragua and comes through here every now and then. We checked him out online and learned that he describes himself as the Nicaragua Surf Pioneer. He owns a surf camp in Playa Gigante in Nicaragua. He was quite the character and not at all what we expected.
On Janet's last day, we went kayaking at Shangra La and then went out to Soggy Peso for an afternoon of Omar music and sunset and then to Tortuga's for some Italian food.
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| Ready, at least in attire, for New York!! |
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| The sun was at Omar's back. |
There were so many other fun things we did together, while Janet was here, that I do not have pictures of: shopping, breakfasts, lunches and dinners out, cooking together at home, book group, yoga with Omar, meditation sessions and yoga with Sherry, visiting friends, looking at houses and just generally enjoying her company. We are sad to see her go, but we think she'll be back soon!
