We made it to Bonaire in time for Tristan’s birthday.  Tristan pointed out that last year we squeaked into Puerto Rico the day of his birthday.  If you look at the map, Puerto Rico is directly north of here.

We arrived late Friday, and early Saturday we were shopping for presents.  Luckily, Bonaire has a great toy store/bookstore with plenty of Legos.  Salt and Light have tons of Legos and our kids love playing with them, so our own Legos have now been revived.  The store even gift wrapped the presents for me!  How nice!  Tristan let me off the hook about making a cake, which if I had more time I would have been glad to do it, but instead we found one at the grocery store.  That night, we had a pizza party with Salt and Light and Therese and Helge from Coquelicot.  Therese sang Happy Birthday to Tristan in Norwegian and gave him a kite.  Salt and Light found some cool Legos he wanted.  After pizza we all went bowling!  It is a small bowling alley, 6 lanes, but it was in great shape.  It had been a year since we had bowled in the Dominican Republic.  Everyone had a great time!

 Therese and Helge

The Aves, our last stop before Bonaire.  Home to lobster and birds.  We saw the birds and Dan and Dennie looked for lobster.  Dennie got lucky.  Dan had several near misses.

   Not your traditional American Thanksgiving, but unforgettable!!!  Roberto (Vento) knew the owners of the restaurant on Crosqui, Patricia and Phillipe.  They prepared us a Thanksgiving feast!!!  Not turkey and mashed potatoes, but Oysters, lobsters, 2 types of tuna prepared sushi style, fish, tiny fried fish, conch salad.  An amazing amount of delicious food!!! (I made chicken, mashed potatoes and green beans for Tristan and Tessa). Therese and Helge, our new Swedish friends, joined us, Salt and Light, Vento, Independence and Uliad for an unforgettable meal, in a tropical setting.  Later that evening, Phillipe even let me play DJ with his surprisingly diverse IPOD.  The mosquitoes started coming at the usual sundown, but Patricia sprayed us down and smoked the place and it was relatively tolerable until about 7:30 pm when it was time to head to Uliad for desert.  We exchanged warm hugs and thanked them for their incredible meal.

They were both so nice.  We finished out the night much too late on Uliad, and everyone was dragging the next day!! Unfortunately, I picked up some allergy and spent the next week with a sore throat, cough and stuffy head!

  Jenny, Kathleen and I helped the kids with the head dresses

  Rennie set up the Tee Pee for the kids to paint

  The Thanksgiving table

 The restaurant