Day 5: Tech & Laundry Day

I was up early, catching up on work projects. I’ve been using my Verizon international modem which works great and has allowed me to stay connected with work on a daily basis. Phew! Although I’m not exactly clear on the charges and have already received a few messages regarding my data usage (uh oh!). Plus, Verizon thinks I am in the Netherlands and every website I go to comes up in Dutch.

But as of today, we are switching to Vodafone, the local carrier. Jim took off early to run errands and hit the Vodafone store. So now we are setup with a local network via Vodafone and for a small monthly charge we have wifi. Yay!

We also tackled laundry today – a real chore! We have a small washer and no dryer. It is very humid inside the house so the best chance of truly drying your clothes is outside on the clothes line. Gone are the days of getting 8 loads of laundry done in one shot! There isn’t enough clothes line in this house to hang all the wet clothes for our family! And gone is the idea of getting laundry done on a cold, rainy day when we have nothing to do. So I’ve had to rethink the laundry plan… and I believe one load a day (on the sunny days!) will suffice. And I’ve already told the kids they will be helping me hang and take down the clothes. Something that’s probably not that unusual to them… but definitely not something I have done in my 40 years!

In between laundry and work we did also manage a trip to the local swimming hole (only a 5 min walk from our house). Much of the same - chasing lizards, looking for fish, watching the waves crash against the rock and jumping off the lava rock into the ocean. I think this will be a favorite spot for the kids this month.

It was so nice to finally have a day to get settled. I am really enjoying the slow pace, amazing views and the quiet surroundings. Another great ending to our day – an amazing dinner at the Alkers’ house! If only we had a garden even a quarter of this size! Good friends, food and wine… what more could we need?