September 25

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Off to Tres Trapi, the turtle area, and darn if Hungry Turtle wasn’t there, as usual, in the tender turtle grass just maybe 60’ at the most from the steps where you enter. But this time he also brought his two cousins. We also saw a Southern Stingray (which only Tom saw before) and got a photo of a single white mullet – not a very interesting fish, but one we needed a photo for.

We didn’t see much else, so we headed out further and – yep – we got the pika pika bites again. Interesting how something that is in effect sediment in the ocean can stay in more or less the same place, thru storms and currents. It actually rained on us, and there was a lovely double-rainbow in the sky.

Back home to shower and get ready for church.

When we were at The Kitchen with Tom & Amy we met Rosemary, a person from the church we attended last year at Ronald’s invitation. Rosemary said there were services that started at 8 and 11, so we said see you at 11. When we arrived at 10:50 we were worried – no one milling around outside like before. Nope they were still inside, wrapping up the 8 am service we found. It continued until 11:30, but all was sermon, so we couldn’t really understand what was being said.

Thanks to Paul, one of the English-speaking men in the church t-shirts, however, we found out what was going on – we could have gone off and had lunch then and come back in “about an hour.” And again on Friday night at 7 pm for 2 hours of praise. Even without understanding much, we could tell the spirit was moving, but how we miss the Papiamento/English services of the New Life Tabernacle we attended for years. Paul apologized for not being able to translate on the fly – he is Aruban who went to Holland for college and only knows Spanish because he married a lady from Columbia. So he said he has to go from Spanish to Dutch to English for us. He did tell us that the country is more or less back to pre-Covid business, thank goodness.

The SAD thing is that we also discovered that dear Ronald was finally caught without papers, and has been in a detention center for 2 weeks. We saw his wife, Carolina, and gave her some hugs and told her how sorry we are. No wonder he didn’t answer our WhatsApp – he gets the phone for only 2 hours Mondays/Wednesdays/Fridays.

After this we had a cheese and tomato sandwich at home and headed off for some hot birding: Bubali Bird Sanctuary Towers and Spanish Lagoon. Actually we stopped at the bakery in Shaba and got our one and only Mispel Ice Cream to fortify ourselves beforehand.

Fortunately we saw 2 shoco burrowing owls (I was afraid the torrential rains had drowned them when we saw only 1 the other day). We met a retired couple from Luxemburg who makes our traveling pale by comparison. They spent 300 days on the road just before covid, and just did 4.5 months in South America backpacking. !!!! They will be here for a month – anything less is a waste of time. True.

We also saw both humming birds, but got only one on film. This has not been bad for birdwatching: I calculated 30 different species, and that is with nothing new or amazing.

We have just enjoyed our final Brown Lady, and although we had considered jumping in the pool and/or into the “big water” with the float, we ended up being lazy and coming back to the room to drink them and enjoy the air conditioning!! We also have to keep up our Duolingo work lest we slip down in our leagues.

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