2 months late!

2 months without an entry is a new record! This summer fly by and was quite hectic. School just started and two days in we were already having a hard time getting out the door in the morning!  This summer we went to the Bahamas and Cuba for our family adventure.  The kids loved the Bahamas and Cuba was...well... HOT! I love Cuba, but it was a poor choice for a family trip in the summer.  Basically the entire trip was a comedy of errors.  Our Airbnb host failed to pick us up at the airport and I - naive me - didn't have a back up plan other than some phone numbers to call.  It turns out that people often don't answer the phone because it costs them money, the phone system doesn't work, phones just stop working or people just really don't care enough to answer the phone.  So there we were stuck at the airport with no where to go so we hired some random people with a jeep to drive us around town looking for the house. 2 hours  and 2 buckets of sweat later we stopped at a hotel and paid $10 to access the internet so I could send the host an email. Anyone who knows Carlos knows he doesn't forgive easily so there was no forgiving the Airbnb host and we had to find a new place to stay.  It turns out that is really hard to do!  I was probably the only one who actually enjoyed the trip, but there were a few favorite activities for all of us like hiring old convertible cars in the evenings to take us around town once it cooled down a bit. Charlie took percussion classes and loved them and the small part of old town Havana that is renovated is gorgeous.  But it was only on our very last day that Carlos decided he liked it and might entertain the idea of going back this winter.

Going to the store was one of the most frustrating. Whole aisles would be empty or filled with random things. One time we went there was an entire aisle full of olives! olives! Diego was so excited!  Here was the frozen food section:


We stayed at Atlantis in the Bahamas.  I thought it was going to be soul crushing, but it was actually way less bad than I anticipated. We got upgraded to a 1 bedroom apartment in one of the newer towers so we could cook meals and enjoyed an ocean view and full rainbow.  Nevertheless it is pretty weird  - totally out of place and outside the resort there is a lot of poverty.

 

We also spent a lot of time this summer in Philadelphia as my mom is packing up her house. The boys went to camp at GA and they loved it. And we even fit in a trip up to Pine Orchard....