Winter is here!

Hello!  Hard to believe it is December already.  Wow how fast time goes.  It is strange how time feels out here since there aren't any seasons.  Back home it would be getting nice and cool right about now, which would let us know when it is.  Matt misses the colder weather sometimes...Mindi does too, she just won't admit it!  She misses it being cold outside, as long as she is nice and warm inside with a fire and hot chocolate!  However it just doesn't feel like December sometimes and we talked today about how that is a weird thing to get used to.

We had a great Thanksgiving break!  We watched football and ate all day on Thanksgiving, which is celebrated out here on Friday to correlate with Thanksgiving back home.  And we hosted a glow in the dark golf outing and dinner for a group we are a part of, which was fun!  We have been playing and coaching a lot of volleyball and Matt is finding that his joints don't warm up or cool down as fast as they did when he was in college!!!

Matt's parents will be here in barely over 2 weeks!!!!!!!  We get excited about that every time we think about it! We are just so pumped to share everything with them and enjoy some time with them!

We got a driver's licence for the island golf carts, so we rented a cart and took a little spin around the island.  We stopped at different places and took some pictures.  Here is us standing on the highest point on the island, which is on a man-made hill 40 feet high.  Driving the golf cart was the first driving we had done since we left the states, so it was fun.  Mindi told Matt that he isn't any more careful of a driver here than he was when we left!

Here is a panoramic shot from the top of the tallest hill.  Kind of hard to get much perspective, but it gives you some idea of the views!

We have entered the windy season!  the rainy season is over.  It still rains, though, but the rain showers last a short amount of time because the wind is blowing so hard it blows the storms through quickly.  Everyday the wind has been averaging 20-30 mph for the last 2 weeks or so.  It makes it feel cooler, which is nice, but it is awefully hard to bike into the wind!  We need sails on our bikes sometimes!

Here is a picture ocean side.  The picture above of the palm tree is pointing into the lagoon.  You can see how different the water looks.  It is pretty interesting in that where the waves are crashing (about 100 feet offshore) is the drop off.  Where the waves crash it is about 5 foot deep at high tide.  Go another 100 feet and it is literally 1000 feet deep.  The drop off is pretty steep down to the depths!  You can see the different colors before and after the waves showing the drop off.