Hooky and Hammocks

Because Selwyn was on vacation all week, Tom and I took a little time to play hooky too. On Thursday afternoon we quit work at about 1:00, and drove up to Rio On Pools. It takes about a half hour to get there, so we were there for a good hour before the Caracol tour traffic started coming in, and it again amazed us that these beautiful spots are right off the road, and we go so often and nobody is there. Of course the rocks filled with sunbathers when the Caracol convoy came, but by then we’d had plenty of sun and had warmed our bones on the sun-baked rocks after taking a dip in the cool clean pools.

The other thing we did while Selwyn was off was to buy hammocks, which we’ve been talking about doing ever since we moved into this cabin ten months ago. We decided we needed hammocks for the guest cabin porches, so a couple of weeks ago we picked up a string hammock in San Ignacio. We hung it on the porch to the back guest room, but it wasn’t very comfortable. The center seemed to be too tight, and you couldn’t just relax in it, you had to balance so you wouldn’t roll out. We thought we were just being dumb gringos who didn’t know how to hang a hammock, so we had some of the neighbors come over to look at it, and they assured us it was defective. When we bought it, the guy at the store said it was his last one, so we were hoping to get our money back. We’ve also been looking at some folding wooden suitcase stands most of the furniture stores around here carry, and had been thinking about buying one so Tom can use it as a model and build some. When we took the hammock back, as we expected, the guy just offered to give us our money back, but he’d just been to the bank and didn’t have a lot of cash. Another customer was in the store and was just about to buy stuff, so we said we’d wait until she checked out and then figure out what to do. As we were browsing in the store, I spied one of the folding suitcase stands holding a stack of placemats. Tom, always the dealer, offered the guy an even exchange for the hammock with the used suitcase stand, which the guy was happy to accept. We’d already bought two new hammocks which cost a little more than half what the original had cost, so without shelling out much more cash we had two hammocks instead of one AND a used suitcase stand to use as a model.

Now the only thing we have to decide is if it’s a good thing to have a hammock on our porch, since both of us have noticed that it seems to call our names every time we walk past.