What a day! The office Elders, Elder Huey and Elder Barquero, and I started early. We were at the “Centro de Servicio” by 9:30 to drop off the office’s weekly reports, pick up our “Pouch” mail and pick up supplies for the mission. We got an early start this morning on our “Diligencias” (Errands) so Hna. Johnson and I could leave the office by 11:00am to rendezvous with the Whitakers, the office couple in the Santo Domingo East Mission. We are taking a day and a half for our p-day and had to get a jump on it.
For months the Whitakers have been planning a trip to the extreme northwest corner of the DR to a town named Monte Cristi on the Atlantic coast. They invited us to go with them and we were delighted to accept. They’ve been to this beach three times in the past and it is a gold mine for finding colorful seashells.
The drive took us 5 hours. I was very surprised to see rain on our trip. November to April is the dry season in the DR but you wouldn’t know it from the clouds and rain on the north half of the island. It was great.
When we got to our hotel (Hotel Los Jardines) we didn’t even change cloths. We went straight to the beach and started picking up tons of beautiful seashells. I’ve never seen so many shells on a beach before. The beach was literally covered with a myriad of different beautiful shells.
We had less than 2 hours of daylight when we reached the beach but in that short time we picked up buckets full of shells. And it wasn’t as if we were picking up everyone we found, there were far too many to do that, we only picked up the prettiest, most colorful or unusual ones. It was a seashell hunter’s paradise. Hna. Johnson was so elated she was squealing like a little school girl.
The owner of the hotel, Herve Lejeaille, also owns a restaurant in town named “El Bistrot” (elbistrot.com) and we ate dinner there. It was a lovely little place to eat and the “Dominican” style food was all wonderful. I asked him what he had that was a typically Dominican dish and he said, “Chivo al Creolle”. It means “Goat prepared Dominican style”! I’ve never eaten goat before and it was very good. Everything he served us was very good.
No comments:
Post a Comment