A Day in Marindia

We took a little trip to Marindia, yesterday. That is where our new house is located. It's not really a town, more like a community of houses between towns. Towards the south is Salinas, a very small town, though it does have lots of services on the main road (markets, medical, pharmacy and restaurants) that are open all year round. But less than 5 miles north is Atlantida, the main town in our area, with more than enough activities year around and served by one of the largest stores (Tienda Inglesa). The bus stop at the highway where we get off made us wonder. It had "107" spray painted on it. For those that don't know, in New York we lived at 107 Columbia Heights. And in Seattle at 107 S. 107th Street. So it was kind of weird to see that. As it turns out, the rest of the spray paint job read "107.7 fm"- no doubt a popular radio station.

The main road from the highway to the beach is only about a 5 minute walk. Actually quite easy to get to and from bus service on foot. As we walked towards the beach, the road is "paved" more or less. It is a coarse rock and asphalt finish, but better than many. And midway between the highway and the beach is the little obligatory plaza. Yes a little traffic circle (for those 3 or 4 cars an hour) with a small statue (didn't check who it was, yet) and then you continue on down to the beach, leaving the paved portion behind. Still, the dirt roads in Marindia were very well cared for, and heavily tree lined. This is winter, so most of the trees are bare- but I can imagine that they will be glorious in spring. Almost all of the houses were very expensive homes, so it would seem that though it is a small community- it falls on the luxury end of the scale. I am pretty sure that we wouldn't have been able to afford most of the houses we admired.

Down at the beach, we saw a young man fishing. He said he didn't catch fish- but it was relaxing. Just my kind of fishing. We saw this imprint of a horse's hoof in the sand. But other than that, there were not more than 6 people out on this sunny and warm Sunday afternoon. Then looking back from the beach, at the water's edge, we saw our house! Denise was thrilled. If you were walking along this beach, looked up and saw it, you might say "boy, I wish I could live there", and that's exactly where we are planning to live. I think if you click on the picture, you can get a pretty good idea of what we saw. It is the brick house with large orange (yeah, I know) shutters covering the windows.

Then we walked up to the property and saw that we already had dogs- four of them. I think they belong to the neighbor. I'm torn between shutting off their access or leaving it open and having free guard dog service without having to feed them.

Then we walked back up the road, looking at all of the beautiful houses surrounding us. We are going to have to do a lot of work to measure up to the neighborhood. Coming up from the beach we saw "Club Marindia". It was an open building and some kids were inside, playing table tennis. Couldn't really tell whether it was public or private. Maybe that is our local country club?? Looks like they could use a good maintenance supervisor.

On the way back to Atlantida, we walked up the other street into Marindia. We were pleased to find a little supermarket, butcher, wifi spot and around the corner a little bar (serves food, as well) and all of them were year round service. So we will not have to be going into Atlantida as often as we had expected.

It was a nice little visit to our new community on a warm Sunday afternoon.