Great week where nothing went according to plan!

Throughout life, you only get a handful of people that really get you, that you really enjoy and can fully be yourself with. Luckily for me, my mom is one of these people for me, she is just one of my favorite people and a real inspiration to me. (Don't worry dad, you are right up there too, but mom has the girl thing on you, sorry!) And, again luckily for me, she just came to visit me in Trinidad!! So I went home for a week to go to a friend's wedding (woo Bowden!), do some interviews (I just accepted a position with ConAgra in Council Bluffs, IA) and visit Brenton and the family. Then mom came back to Trinidad with me to spend a week gallivanting around the island. It was so wonderful to have her here and here's an account of some of our adventures...

The Hike
So one thing mom really wanted to do was go on a hike, so I called up some friends to plan a nice, simple hike for us to some beautiful waterfall. A friend posed Rincon, telling me it was a 45 minute walk with a couple challenging hills but a great end destination...mom was up for the mini-challenges so we set it up. Have I ever mentioned that Trinis have a way of distorting time? The 45 min was really and hour and 45 minutes and the little challenging hills were actually one of the following: straight uphill, gradually uphill for a really long time or plummeting downhill. I'm not sure there were more than 15 feet of straight ground the whole time! This face explains everything...

But, a couple falls, scrapes and bruises later we did reach the waterfall and it was incredibly beautiful. I've never seen a taller waterfall and the pool was clear and cool, just right after the hot hike!


The whole thing was quite a challenge, but we did it! It was quite a sense of accomplishment getting back to the car (and mom was quite proud she wasn't last!). Everyone was impressed with mom's tenacity and a few of the girls told me how brave they thought she was, sounds about right to me!

Hotel Flip Flop
So after the hike, the plan was to stay a couple nights in Blanchisseuse and relax by the beach, b..u..t, that isn't quite how it all worked out. Neither the hotel nor the taxi driver who was going to take us there ever answered or returned any of my phone calls (still, to this day have not called me back even though I had a room reserved!) so we needed a new plan. On the way back from the hike we stopped at Maracas Bay to feast on the famous Bake n' Shark (mom thought we were saying bacon something and was very confused by the fried piece of meat inside the fried piece of dough we gave her!). The meal was delicious and happened to be right next to the Maracas Bay Hotel...light bulb! So we stayed the night there, did the next day at the beach and rested our tired legs! The whole thing worked out better than we could have planned and gave us an extra day to gallivant some more. This one is proof that we were on a beach, you can kinda see sand and water in the background.



The Rain Game
So right now it is the rainy season here in lovely Trinidad which means you just never know what you are going to get. One morning we had planned to go to the botanical gardens and the zoo...it poured and flooded a bit (ended up having a delicious lunch and shopped around a little strip mall). Went to yoga in Port of Spain...it poured and flooded a bit (still made it out alive and in time to go see our chick flick). Wanted to spend our last afternoon hanging out, reading and relaxing...it poured and flooded up the valley to my house and we got stuck in a maxi trying to get home for 2 hours (still enjoyed the rest of our afternoon though). So the rain won sometimes, but we always seemed to make a come back!



Gasperee Caves
Since we had an extra day, we went on a tour of Gasperee Caves on a "3 Hour Tour" (the name made us a little worried, we don't have too much experience making coconut radios, but no Gilligan's Island repeats on this particular day). We ended up being the only two people on the tour that day, so we could go at our own pace and decide what all we wanted to do. The tour guide even let us swim in the lake inside the cave, which you are totally not allowed to do! The caves were really cool, I had never seen anything like it before, but sorry, pictures just don't really do it justice, so I am just putting a couple up.




So we did some other stuff too...went on a fabric shopping extravaganza, ate some good Trini food, went to the movies, did some yoga, went for walks, read, went to a game for the U-17 women's world cup that is hosted by Trinidad this year and ate some more. It was a really great week! Here are just a couple more pics...