Flying home

February 22nd, 2008 3:03 PM Puerto Plata Int’l Airport

Well I am en route back to the States for a few days to try and finish things up as quickly as possible. I’m going to have to hit things hard to get them done in the short time I have. As of right now, I’m uncertain which direction I will be going in the next week. I have e-mailed Brett and Naomi from the Fearless trip a couple of times and as of yet, haven’t heard back. I let them know that they would need to find a new crew member for their trip but I offered to help cross the Pacific if they couldn’t find anyone on short notice. I won’t know for a couple of days but next weekend I will be flying either back down here to the east side of the DR or if Brian stays in company with the other cruisers he might be able to make it to Puerto Rico without me and I will fly in there. If the crew from Fearless are desperate than I will have to honor my commitment and fly down to Mexico and help them cross to the South Pacific. I really hope they are able to find someone because it’s starting to get expensive flying all over the place.

Currently I am sitting in the airport in Puerto Plata, DR. They do not have internet connection here unless you want to pay 25 dollars down in the private VIP lounge but no thank you so I will probably be posting this sometime late tonight. I’ll wait til Houston. The flight doesn’t leave for another three hours and it’s going to be a long day of travel for me. I am flying from here to Miami, instantly connecting to a flight over to Houston, then I have the privilege of a 6 hour layover there until I leave around 6 AM from there to fly direct into Fresno. I land around 9 AM there and from what I was told the big birthday/bon voyage bash for me starts at 6 PM so I should be sufficiently exhausted by the time the drinks start flowing. I’m sure that my friends will accept no less than me being in a hurt locker at the end of the night. Of course, I did a fine job of that the other night during the eclipse. The cruisers put on a big party up on one of the hills overlooking Luperon. It was awesome. There is a nice piece of land up there that one of the cruising couples decided to buy but they haven’t built a house yet so it is still undeveloped. They built a huge bonfire and everyone brought a covered dish to go with the hot dogs that were provided. The food was great. Most people hung out until the fire got into full swing but by the time the eclipse started there were only a few of us left. A couple of the cruisers who have become locals there provided transportation up to the party. Brian and I got to ride in an old Daihatsu work truck sitting in the bed on the ride up the hill. These same people were shuttling people back after the food and during the fire. The eclipse started somewhere between 9 and 10 and was definitely worth checking out. I’m glad I didn’t miss it. After the eclipse, we hung out drinking for a while until we got rides figured out and brought a bunch of stuff back down the hill. I was hanging out with Dave, a real cool guy who comes from Oklahoma and is always the life of the party. He used to own a karaoke business and his wife and him live on their boat, Carry Okies, got that one? Anyway, he is comedy and has been in Luperon since last summer when they originally planned on only a few weeks there. Kenny and Dan were the other two guys who stayed behind and they were fun too. Kenny should be a freaking stand up comedian and Dan is the dude who owns the land we partied at. Dave and Dans’ wives were also there hanging with us so it was a good group. When we finally got out of there, we somehow ended up going down to the Puerto Blanco marina bar to have some more drinks. The really cool English couple that Brian bought the dinghy from were at the bar and a guy named Mark who owns a marina in Annapolis and is planning on upgrading the current one in Luperon. So of course, I just had to have drinks with them too, right? It was already getting very late and I was well on my way to retard drunk so it probably wasn’t a good thing that the owner kept the bar open late for us and I just kept pounding away on the old Presidente cerveza. It was around 3 AM when I finally got a ride back to the boat my extra retard gear kicked in. Now I usually reserve this for special occasions and evidently, a full eclipse qualifies for just that. I hopped in the dinghy and cruised into town. I have no idea what I was hoping to find. Luperon is very small and the bars and only disco close around midnight during the week so I was already just a tad late. I basically wandered around the town for the next two hours trying to find something to do. Defeated, I walked back to the dinghy pier and our dinghy was not where I left it. I searched all over the little dock and could not find it. I thought maybe the line gave out and it could have floated off into the mangroves nearby so I hopped into another dinghy to borrow it just long enough to find ours. I freaking looked for an hour, all over that stupid bay. Nowhere to be found. It was dark so I decided to go back to the boat and wait for daylight. Brian woke up and asked what happened. I told him and as soon as it was light we went looking for it. We ended up finding it UNDERNEATH the pier on the opposite side from where I originally tied it. It was a total fucking fiasco and I felt like a total jackass for the whole episode. As my buddy Banana Dan says, I should have just stayed home and watched Cops. I didn’t know it was possible to consume close to ten 22 ounce bottles of beer but if anyone is dumb enough to try I suppose it’s yours truly. The best part was that Brian wanted to drive to Santo Domingo, the capital city and I had less than an hour of sleep to run on. I’m fairly certain I was drunk until about 2 PM yesterday at which point I ate some sort of miraculous chicken club sandwich that healed me and prevented a hangover. Whatever was in that thing should be bottled and sold to assholes like me everywhere. I’m just glad Brian used to be a hardcore partier and more or less shakes his head at me, knowing exactly where I’m at because he did the same dumb shit long before I was even born.

We left around 9 AM and cruised through Santiago, La Vega, Santo Domingo, San Cristobal and finally ended up staying on the south shores of the DR near the Caribbean Sea in a place called La Najayo. It was very cool. Driving through the country was extremely interesting. Santo Domingo has so much history and I would love to go down and spend a few weeks just hanging out there walking around and checking out all the old museums and architecture. Some of the buildings there are 500 years old including the old Alcazar of Christopher Columbus’ son. The little hotel near the beach we stayed in was nice. Small, quiet and clean. When we got checked in, we walked down to the beach and got a small table to hang out at. He ordered some food and we just kicked back in the cabana. The beach there is full of Dominican people fishing, swimming, floating, bbqing, and drinking lots of rum. There are people walking up and down trying to sell anything and everything, much like Mexico and the beaches there. One kid who was probably 8 or 9 was trying to sell three coconuts he had climbed up and gotten off one of the trees. He was a persistent little sucker and Brian ended up giving him the rest of his meal along with some Pepsi. He tore into it like he hadn’t eaten in a month. Some of his family came running over and they devoured the food in minutes. It’s a wild place. We were in a very poor area. The hotel we stayed in didn’t even have internet service. Life throughout the country is obviously much different than ours. All along the roads there are random little tilt up and shacks scattered around with merchants trying to sell anything from fruit to rum to little carvings. I drove back today from La Najayo up to Puerto Plata and it took us over 5 hours. The roads we used for the most part were cut through several mountains and the scenery was nice. All along the roads there are little villages grouped together and scattered randomly. Nothing is clearly marked so you are kind of guessing or hoping that you are on the right road. It also helps that everyone here drives like lunatics. L.A. traffic at it’s worst can’t touch this place. In California, most people don’t know HOW to drive. Here, you need to be qualified to race in fucking Nascar in order NOT to wreck. There are motoconchos (little cheap motorcycles) EVERYWHERE. Thousands of them. You feel like you are in a video game trying to dodge them as they weave in and out and drive the wrong way whenever they feel like it. It does make sense that most people drive these though because gas is 165 pesos per gallon which is over 5 dollars U.S. per gallon. There is trash all over the place. They don’t have very good sanitation down here most people just toss things out the windows of cars. You can see huge piles of trash all over due to the fact that instead of being picked up it’s just burned when the pile gets big enough. It was a very enlightening drive and we managed to survive unscathed and got here around 1:30 PM.

As for me, I’m looking forward to getting back home to finish things up. I have been letting all the loose ends nag at me and there are a lot of things I need do. Ideally, I’m really hoping that I can get back down here in a week and have everything done. It will be a massive relief on my nerves and I think I will really be able to settle into the boat and my new lifestyle. I have enjoyed the hell out of the last few weeks down here with Brian but the whole time I have had the little nag in the back of my mind that won’t let me forget the responsibilities of the life I left behind. Once I close that chapter of my life I’m hoping to completely immerse myself in the development of a successful charter business with the boat. I’m confident I will. This whole experience has been one that will undoubtedly leave me forever changed. The simplicity of this life is what I have been yearning for. I’m looking forward to seeing my friends and family one more time before I leave for a long time, it will be a good week back home. For now, I will close saying that I hope I actually live long enough to experience all this. I have no doubt developed some sort of cancer in the last two hours of sitting in this waiting area completely bombarded with the second hand smoke from all these mutants around me. Apparently I didn’t get the memo from the dude who printed my boarding pass that it is a requirement in this airport to chain smoke incessantly with no regard for who is sitting near you. I apologize if there are any typos or grammatical errors in this post, it is difficult to see the screen through the haze.

February 22nd, 8:37 PM Maimi Int'l Airport

I barely made it through customs with enough time to sprint to my gate for my connecting flight to Houston where I will spend 7 wonderful hours waiting for my flight to Fresno. No time to type but just wanted to get this posted.