Christmas in Nicaragua

Matt and I want to say a big thank you to my mom, dad and sisters, Tine and Jen. They all made the trek down to Nicaragua for Christmas, and despite a number of travel difficulties, they have since all made it back to the states in one piece.

The fam arrived the Saturday before Christmas, late at night, so we jumped across the highway and spent the night at Las Mercedes hotel before getting up bright and early. We headed to Somoto in the 16-passenger van that we had rented (the next smallest vehicle supposedly held 8 passengers and 2 pieces of luggage. But with all of the bags in tow and a promise to Matt that we wouldn’t abandon the dog for the week, we needed a bit more room, so a ‘microbus’ it was).

We made a quick stop at the famous la Casita for lunch and then we arrived in Somoto on a lazy Sunday afternoon. Mom, Dad, Tine and Jen checked into the Hotel Colonial in town and came over to meet Astro and see the house. We followed it up with a fabulous dinner at our host-family’s house, prepared by Akhnaton. The meal was absolutely over the top – salad followed by a steak topped with two traditional Nicaragua sauces, locally-made sausage, baked potato stuffed with queso and butter, and a desert of jello and ice cream. Unfortunately, we forgot to take pictures so we don’t have any evidence of the meal, except perhaps a few extra pounds.

After a night in Somoto, we made our way down one of the worst roads in Nicaragua to the beach at Leon, las peñitas. We spent a relaxing two nights there, getting to know the local beach, food and dogs (yes, Astro went with us).  Then we headed to the famous Ometepe, where we spent Christmas. We went horse-back riding (the planned 3-hour trip rapidly devolved into an hour once we realized that few of us were actually cut out to sit on a horse’s back for any substantial length of time) we saw petroglyphs, monkeys and just relaxed. We planned to spend our last day exploring Masaya and the Masaya volcano, but due to some travel difficulties leaving the island, our departure was delayed 7 hours and we just made it to get the van back 5 minutes before the 8-oclock deadline.

All in all, I think that it was a good trip. We don’t have a lot of photos, because most were taken with my mom’s camera. Maybe she’ll write a post and we can see my family’s opinions of Nicaragua and some of the pictures that they have!