Blogging frustration..

I woke up this morning and Jay rolled over and gently touched my arm and said, it's time to get up soon for diving. I was thinking to myself "he's being weird", he just was. Then he said "I had a weird dream.." Here we go.."you broke up with me, well I guess it would be divorce now, but we were at hockey practice and you were the coach - this is where I started to question the reality of this situation (he said) - and you said 'listen I could be out with for dinner with candlelight instead of here at practice too' and I said "wait, what? Who are you dating" and you said "his name is Kelly".  This became an all day event this dream. 

Jay, Trev and I went down to Bridgetown this morning and went diving.  It took us about an hour to get down to Bridgetown to the dive shop and we hit a bit of a traffic jam at one point because there is no right turn lane (and right is like our left) for cars getting onto the highway so it was jammed up.  While we were waiting to get past that point we could hear sirens - we are on a narrow two lane road with traffic traveling in both directions and no shoulder and yet we're supposed to pull over for the prison bus (yes, prison bus) that is coming straight down the middle of the road behind me.  I'm not sure what kind of emergency necessitates a prison bus having a siren in the first place, but I'm pretty sure in this instance they just didn't want to wait in traffic!

We got to the dive shop just a little late, with one call to the shop to get directions as we stopped at a gas station.  Nothing has a street address here, you just plug into the GPS the nearest point of reference you can find (in this case it was the Garrison Horse Track) and do your best from there.
Jay had forgotten his PADI card, so he had to call back to the house and get Dwayne to get it out of the safe and read him off the number.  Because he's coming back tomorrow they were ok with him not having it with him, they can check it tomorrow.

We got on the boat and introduced ourselves to the other divers, we met Madeline and Stetson..Jay was like "Stetson! Now that's a great handle", while Patrick, our dive instructor kept calling him Stenton or Stilton..I said its Stetson, like the cowboy hat. Patrick said "I'm British, what do I know about Cowboys?"

Our first dive was off the reef and was a drift dive with the current.  It was a really cool reef, with lots of little fish and a small wreck that we could look at.  We always check air levels before and after the dive..I started with 3100 psi and ended with 1800..I'm a very relaxed breather in the water. Jay ended with under 1,000 which is typical.  Patrick said our second dive we would have a contest to see who could come back with the most air left. After the first dive we went back to the beach to pick up 5 divers who were doing a Discover Scuba Diving morning, so they did a bit of training while we went out for our first dive and they joined us for the second dive, which was pretty much just off the shore to see 4 or 5 wrecks.  During our 30 minutes above the water to equalize Jay turned to Trev and said "Hey Trev, you know any guys named Kelly?"..seriously?  "Nope, I don't think so" and Jay says "well if you know anyone named Kelly and see them hanging around my house then let me know". Oh brother. 

When we set up our equipment for our second dive onto our new tanks my secondary regulator was leaking air.  For anyone that doesn't dive your equipment always has a secondary regulator in case a) your buddy needs to use your air or b) something malfunctions on your primary regulator. I said to Patrick "no wonder I came back with only 1800, I was leaking!"  Patrick said I was being cocky.  He also said "don't worry about it, it will be fine".   I think he just wanted to win the contest.

We got in the water and immediately descended.  Patrick told us to meet him down there, to feel free to explore the first wreck and to just wait there and he would be down in a second. There was another instructor in the water with us with the Discover divers, so we just went down, cruised around, went in the wreck and around the wreck and waited. Then Patrick met us and we went off to the second wreck. One of the wrecks the we were diving you can actually snorkel to from the beach, but there were like 50 snorkels and butts sticking out of the water around the buoy indicating the wreck, so you can't be afraid of a crowd out there.  I'd be pissed if I paid for a snorkel tour to bring me out and you could get to it free from the beach!  So I made sure to email Mom and Maria to bring their snorkels for next week and we can hit that spot.

We were almost to the second wreck when Patrick's tank blew an o-ring and he started spouting air out the top. So Trev, as his buddy, went over and Patrick used his extra regulator.  Patrick indicated that he couldn't fix it and he was heading up, but for us to stay down and just join the other group.  It was kind of freaky, but good that it happened to the instructor.  We joined the other group of divers that was on our boat and followed G, their instructor. We were allowed to penetrate the wrecks, while the Discover divers were not. We saw a small reef shark right off the bat, then later saw a sea turtle pretty close up, though when we went up to the surface I said "the sea turtle was pretty cool" and Trev said "There was a sea turtle?"  We got on the boat and I said to Patrick, "way to throw the air contest, were you that worried I was going to win?"

We went back in to shore and headed back to the house where Julia had prepared for us a lunch of chicken roti, ate up and then assumed our positions on the patio, drink in hand. Dwayne laid down on the couch and said "are you going to blog?"  I said yeah, but I'll do it later in bed, I'm just making some notes on stuff so I don't forget what happened today and actually I'm looking up vacation houses for next year,  Dwayne suggested that I should aspire to have a day on vacation that I have nothing to write about, where I do literally nothing all day...I feel like that's what we've been doing, it just reads like we're busy!  And, I think we're going to go to Costa Rica again next Jan!

While we were diving the girls spent the morning with Dwayne and Lea. They went down the road a bit to Mullins beach, where they bought the girls boogie boards. They had had breakfast, made by Julia, of French toast and bacon (which we missed because we were diving). When Julia asked who was eating my girls said they already ate and weren't hungry..we had given them a piece of toast before we left because they were up. 

OH MY GOD, I just lost what I wrote for the last 40 minutes..I'm so mad.  I might just give up on today.  AND, I delete my notes as I blog, so now I have to try to remember all that crap that was fun about yesterday..here goes...now I'm on my computer instead of my ipad anyway, so it should be faster..frig.

...So, even though the girls said that they didn't want any of the french toast, Sophie ended up demoing 4 pieces, which left Dwayne and Lea to share a piece!  I would have been like "yeah, not happening, you said you didn't want any - go have a banana"..but maybe not to their kid, so I get where they were coming from too.  Though it is funny, Dwayne said later that Leanne had sounded like me more talking to the girls at the beach - I'm pretty sure she told them "You're fine" more than once!  Good on ya'.  Sophie totally made up for what we are calling the 'breakfast incident'  later though.  Avery gave Dwayne her last bit of Rice Krispies square to have a 'bite' and he accidentally dropped it at the beach.  He tried to pick it up and wipe it off as best he could, but wiping sand off of a Rice Krispie square is suspect at best.  So he took a bite to see if he had done an adequate job and no, it was not edible.  As Leanne said, there is no 5 second rule with Rice Krispie squares in the sand!  Total meltdown potential, this kid eats Rice Krispies squares like Jay.  So Sophie said "She can have mine.." Crisis averted and french toast thievery forgotten! They came back to the house and had lunch just before we arrived back for our roti.

We spent the afternoon doing nothing, sitting, chatting, maybe swimming.  At one point Jay pushed two of the big, square chairs together and curled up and had a nap.  Dwayne had offered him the couch twice, but he declined.  Avery came out and said "What's he doing?"  He's having a nap.  "He looks like a giant baby".  Yup, that sounds about right.

The girls have been asking for a couple of days to go shopping, they have money from back home burning a hole in their pockets.  So we left for dinner a little early in order to go to the shops before we ate since the last two times we've been out to do some shopping the shops have been closed.  We got there and the shops were closed.  You've GOT to be kidding me, we are so terrible at this.  So we went straight to dinner at a place called Just Grillin' that Lea found online or in one of the books we've been left.  We sat down and looked at the menu and Lea asked the server if the jerk chicken was hot..she said "It depends, just a second" and she went back to the kitchen and brought us out a sample!  Dwayne says all restaurants should do that!  Four of us ordered the jerk chicken, the kids had hamburgers (we re-instituted the travel stars reward system that we devised on our trip to London last year if we can get through dinner without a tonne of whinging, its awesome) and Dwayne had a fish of some kind, I can't remember.  Then the guys got dessert, oh yeah - Jay is back on sugar.  He's binging.  He had chocolate bars, he had cheese cake, he had carrot cake, he's had COKE people!  I can't say anything though, I've gone through 3 bottles of tequila with Trevor in 4 days, I guess we're binging too.

During dinner Leanne was on guard all night, sometimes standing beside the table and glaring around us, watching for mosquitos.  She's petrified of the Chikungunya virus that mosquitos carry down here - granted it does sound horrible, but there have only been 58 cases in Barbados so I think we're probably ok.  In other news, Avery is all stopped up and hasn't pooped since the plane ride here, so she also picked up some medicine for Avery and every 5 minutes rushed her to the bathroom, while on her off minutes glared at us and the patrons around us like an angry, pregnant, maniac while shooing away imaginary mosquitos.

Dinner just finished and dessert consumed and Dwayne says "What time is it anyway?  Is it too early for bed?" I looked at my watch and said "6:40..no, not too early for bed"  He said "what?!"  I mean, its dark, you're tired, you're on vacation - go to bed, we're not judging you.  He said "This vacation is awesome, I love you guys so much"..and Leanne is in her glory!  She lives to sleep, so the fact that we're all in bed by 9pm is amazing for her.

As we were leaving the restaurant a guy saw Trev's Maple Leafs t-shirt and said "Ah, some people from Toronto, we just got in a couple of hours ago"..oh, we heard its cold at home.."It is SO cold at home, -27 today, I literally thought I was going to die getting from the car to the terminal"  (and he had taken a limo to the airport, so he literally meant from the car to the terminal.  So glad we're here.  I also got a text today from Juls that said "My love for you guys is unconditional..but in this -33 weather and seeing those beautiful beaches WTF!!!"  I wrote her back and said "It could have been you!!  They had been invited to come down as well but couldn't because of Kobe's hockey schedule.

I think that was it...I didn't get this posted yesterday because the internet wasn't working up in the room, not because I was eaten by sharks, but thank you for those of you who emailed me just to make sure.