Wednesday 17th January

Luperon
Dominican Republic

19 54.4 N
70 56.5 W

Another day of "hurry up and wait", have you noticed how time drags when you are desperate to get somewhere? We are trying to be patient but the type "A" personality traits are definitely coming to the fore. If we are here much longer I fear we will have read every book in Luperon. We took a leisurely stroll into town with the intention of collecting our laundry. This meant we had to stop at Steve’s place for a couple of drinks and lunch. We got chatting to a family who had just arrived in Luperon, they had followed the same course we did and it made us happy to hear that they had a rough time of it from Provo all the way to here, in fact they had a worse time than we did at Big Sandy Cay as the swell was up and they didn’t put out a bridle – at least we had a decent night’s sleep there before we hit the high winds and waves to get across to here. We managed to read our emails but the connection was so slow that we didn’t try to reply to them as it would have had us there for the rest of the day and as there are only 2 computers we didn’t think it was fair to hog them for too long. I also only managed to load the text for the blog – a couple of pictures will be added when I have a better connection. We were out of luck – our laundry still wasn’t finished drying so we will have to return again – any excuse! We took a short walk further into town as we had run out of eggs, on the way to the supermarket I noticed that one of the small stores had eggs and vegetables so we went there instead. Inside the store sat a little old man – he must have been a hundred or he’s led a hard life, he didn’t speak a word of English but we managed to buy eggs with the help of a young man’s mobile phone to tell us the price. I had taken my own egg carton with me so it was easy to indicate what I needed, besides which I knew the Spanish word for eggs (well who doesn’t- it’s on almost every breakfast menu in Florida!) – Huevos and you can only fit a certain amount in the carton so that bit was easy. The difficulty came with understanding the cost that the man muttered, we tried to get him to write it down – didn’t have a pen, then to indicate the numbers on the scales – he couldn’t do that so he took us 2 stores down where he explained to a young man the price and he dialed it into his phone – how complicated! Any way the 18 eggs cost $2 – pretty fair. I noticed he also had some decent looking vegetables and some lemons, I didn’t like to upset him by asking for them as well so I think that I will put it on my "to do" list for next time but I’ll be certain to carry a calculator and pen with me so we can understand each other when it comes to the cost!
Back on the boat Gerry had to have a siesta whilst I messed about reading and playing cards.