Ok, I am far enough removed from our travel day to detail some of what went down on that blessed day…
So the day started…it was a drizzly and gray Saturday morning, around 5:30 am (CST) and we all packed up our sleeping gear and began loading up our gear on the “Jesus Divine” Tap-tap that would be taking us to the bus station for our trip back into Santo Domingo where we would then connect with another bus to take us the remaining three hours to San Juan…
This is The World Race, things don’t always go as planned…
We got to the bus station, it was beautiful, Coach-type buses, they had air conditioning, perhaps the most comfortable seats I have ever experienced in my life…in a way I knew it was too good to be true…mostly we slept, they woke us up on the border and we had to get off and get our passports stamped and after we made it safely across the border, we were to be given lunch. I was excited for the food, I’ll be honest…didn’t realize that I would be served rice, beans, weird white vegetable and for the kicker…GOAT…I ate goat. I assumed it was beef so I tried to eat it…but there was something about the bony fattiness of it that just wasn’t settling right. Right after we finished lunch, the air conditioner kicked off…and the bus stopped moving forward. Looking around I realized we were in some mountains and yes, we were all going to have to get off of the bus and continue walking up the mountain because we were too heavy to carry up the mountain on the bus.
Our bus makes it, but barely…we are informed that we are going to need to switch buses. SO we move us and all of our luggage from Coach to older dingier…more cramped, but still Coach-like to complete our journey to Santo Domingo.
Hours of sleep later, we arise to find that we have missed our connecting bus…and since we are in a different company’s bus, we have been dropped off at the wrong place…SO we load our stuff into another bus, similar to the one that broke down but it was a BEAUTIFUL air-conditioned plush-seated bus that just reminded us of how most people travel…but not Racers, we don’t need comfort…
So we met up with our contact, Emily, in Santo Domingo and she had two of the “Love-Shack” buses from Travel Day #1, but a little less kitschy…and so we finished our journey cramped and sweating, but alive…
