Well, Happy New Year to one and all! Sorry for the recent lapse in communicating with the world. You see, Jody and I were off in Cuba enjoying a week of fun and sun over the holiday season. I’ll post a few more entries over the next few days about Cuba, but generally speaking, it was a fantastic week! Lots of pictures can be seen here. Every day was between 22 and 29 degrees, with mainly bright and sunny skies. Mind you, yours truly didn’t pick up much of a tan, but rest assured, I drank plenty of rum and spent much time in the water 🙂 The ironic exception to the weather of the week was on New Year’s Eve! We started our day off with plenty of sun and beach walking, followed by my attempts at sailing and windsurfing. From there, Jody and I took out a tandem kayak and went out snorkelling in the water near the hotel. Lots of fun fish. We had an underwater camera, so hopefully some of those shots will turn out. Later on, we had supper at one of the A La Carte restaurants, which we’d booked early in the week. It was very nice, a good way to have New Years Eve supper, away from the big chow hall. The meal was a feat of gastronomic indulgence, as we had a full 7 course meal lasting 3 hours! However, as you can see by this picture, sometime around 10pm, the skies unleashed monsoon-like rain! It was insane. In the span of 15 minutes, the normally dry walkways all over the resort were under ankle-deep water! The rain kept up for almost 2 hours. This made it rather unpleasant to attend the mainly outdoor festivities that the resort had planned out. I feel sorry for all the work they had put in only to be ‘dampened’. As a result, Jody and I ducked back to our cozy room to enjoy the evening in dry comfort. After all, we had a nice covered balcony from which to watch the world. I’ll say this much for the Cubans and New Year’s. They LOVE fireworks! They had shows that were almost the same calibre as the Canada Day fireworks in Ottawa! No joke! It was amazing. At midnight, they had a show of almost a half hour. It was a great way to enjoy the complimentary bottle of champagne that the staff had placed in every room (and complimentary quart of rum, which we took home).
After that, I started dozing off around 10 to 1 in the morning. But then, at one, I was snapped wide awake by another series of explosions! Yup, they had a whole other fireworks show at 1am, presumably for the benefit of all us middle Canadians down celebrating out new year due to the time change! It was really awesome. At one point in the shows, I leaned way out, and you could see all the different shows being put on by the various resorts. It was very memorable, albeit wet. I should mention the rain actually did stop right before midnight, which is likely the only reason we were able to get the fireworks. Thank goodness. Anyway, that was our New Year’s Eve, and we hope everyone else had a great one.
