Yay For The Beach

What do you do when your Canadian friends come for a visit!? You take them to the beach! It has been so busy these last few weeks for Ryan at work that we had to stick pretty close to home while the Banman's were visiting but it worked out to our advantage. We took them south to Punta Bulata where we literally had the entire resort to ourselves. It was so quiet and peaceful, the kids could be as loud and obnoxious as they liked and I didn't have to worry about them bugging other people. It was fantastic! They pretty much lived in the water! They would run, jump and splash in the pool playing around with their new blow up whales:

and then they would run down to the beach and play in the warm shallow waters collecting star fish and other sea creatures.

Brayden took the opportunity of not having to share the pool with strangers to master his flips into the water:

We went for walks along the beach and played with treasures we found. The last few months the weather has been really horrible and I guess they had some huge waves that came and took quite the toll on the beach. There were parts where the roots of the coconut trees were all exposed or the trees had fallen down. I know that erosion is a natural cycle but it's still shocking to see the damage the waves had caused since we had been there last in December. Ryan also scouted out a location for his explosives fire crackers and late one afternoon he and Jeff took off just the two of them and did their thing. Every once in a while we could hear a huge BOOM and we knew what they were doing. On our walks we saw some of the locals hanging out by their boats and some women who were crushing sea urchins and collecting the meat from inside the shells. We got massages and Ryan caught up on some of the sleep he'd missed that week. Juanita and I attempted snorkeling but I got scared off by all the sea weed we had to walk through because it was low tide. Sadly Juanita stepped on a big black sea urchin and got poked in the foot. OUCH! She was pretty dang tough though and went out again the next morning to explore.

It was such a great weekend. I think that everyone enjoyed themselves and we really tried to fit everything in that we could. Jeff even found time to take some pictures of us as a family! Thanks Jeff.

To see more pictures from our fun trip just click here!