Thursday, January 19, 2012

SUNDAY, JANUARY 9, 2012

The Warrenton gang left from DCA, went through Miami where we met Pastor Carrie Evans and then proceeded to Santiago, Dominican Republic.  In the group, me, Tony and Kevin Tedeschi, Matt and Renard Carlos, Asiaha Veney, Stan Parkes, Jim Lavin, John Connolly and Carrie Evans.
Of course, the maximum amount of luggage was brought full of many contributions...so much so that the hotel had to hire a truck to move it.  I rode in the truck -- in the cab -- the first of my many truck rides on this trip.  The only odd thing that happened is the driver brought the truck to a stop to make a call on his cell phone. This would have been fairly mundane (and pleasing to Oprah) had he not done so while in the left lane of a two lane highway...Happily, we weren't rear-ended.


In spite of the fact that it was 11 pm on a Sunday by the time we got in and back out of our hotel, we wandered up the street and found a very nice outdoor cafe called Noah where we had some good and much needed food and some cold Presidentes.  Downtown Santiago is a bustling place with hotels, casinos and outdoor cafes all blaring music and featuring much baseball and soccer on their TVs.


The humor for the evening came from the attractive young hostess insisting to young Matt that there was "no dancing" inside the club even while we could see people dancing.  We resolved that she had simply decided that Matt would not be dancing (with her or anybody else)...Also the "preferred parking" across the street from the place was guarded by a small man with a big gun.  Evidently, the gun of choice for guarding things in both DR and Haiti is the pistol grip shotgun...we kept calling it "sawed off," but that's not right...sawed off means the barrel(s) is/are shortened so the shot blast expands faster...these guns had regular barrels but had pistol grips instead of a stock...Luckily, we never saw any in use.
SOMETHING LIKE THIS...
Now, ironically, almost every business we saw had a "no guns" sign on the door...along with no animals, and, in the case of the casino in our hotel, no phones and no cameras...

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