Packed and On Our Way!!

We are now in Miami, leaving for Santo Domingo in the morning. We filled up the rented truck for the trip to the airport with 10 checked bags, 5 back-packs, 4 carry-ons and one cat carrier! The trip to Miami was pretty uneventful, other than the 90 minutes sitting on the tarmac waiting for the lightening to clear. Lola the boy cat did pretty well on the flight, considering -- only problem was he/she suddenly got quiet and stopped moving about halfway through and I was briefly nervous that we had another animal casualty, but fortunately she had just finally given up the fight and fallen asleep.
We are super-excited for tomorrow. We will post an update as soon as possible from Cabrera, but not sure if we will have internet access anytime soon.

Does this look like the face of a killer?

As many of know, one of our neighbors kindly volunteered to take in our yellow lab Luke for the year, which was super-nice. We dropped him off to his foster home Saturday at 1:00 and then headed to our farewell lunch with our families. By 2:30, Luke was back in our custody! We got a call that Luke had killed the family's pet bird when they had it out of its cage, and that he was no longer welcome to stay. Maybe he was trying to prove that he was worthy of his breed as a bird dog. Of course we feel terrible about what happened. Luke is now an extended stay customer at the local kennel until we can get settled and figure out another option ... Not a great beginning to the year, but things were going so smoothly we figured something was bound to happen. Just didn't imagine it would be this!

Three More Days!!!

Well, we are getting really close to heading to Cabrera. Here's the house we are renting for the year. We didn't see it when we visiting in May, but pictures look great. Not having air conditioning will take some getting used to, but that's probably going to be just one of the many changes for us. Our dining room and toy room at home in Newburgh are currently full of piles of clothes and other items as we are struggling to fit a year's worth of stuff into 10 bags!