Cabarete

It's only been a week since we've returned from Cabarete, but before I get to that I'll wrap up the winter riding from the last couple of months (I'm terrible keeping up with this thing).

Old man winter must be getting soft in his old age because we had another mild winter this year. I only had a total of 3 or 4 snowkiting sessions. One of them was on Lake Zurich on February 16. The wind was pretty gusty, but it was great riding on my 10m and I was able to test out our new camera. I was able snap a couple of pictures until my fingers nearly froze. Overall it was a really fun session and I even landed a couple of jumps!

The only other snowkite session was during a trip up to Marinette. After driving around and trying to find a decent spot for about 45 min we decided to drive out to the "Asylum Farm" which is a big open, public field where we used to go raccoon hunting. It was the perfect place for a ride and ride I did. Well mostly....there were couple of brutal wipeouts that left my face pretty scratched up due to faceplanting into the hard, crusty snow. Even this wasn't enough to dampen my spirits though, as I got to ride around for about 2 hours boosting pretty good airs (and landing about half of them) while Mom and Dad sat and watched from the the roadside.

Only a few weeks later we were on our way to Cabarete, Dominican Republic. It was a bit of a hassle getting there since JetBlue cancelled our flight and we weren't able to arrive until 2 days later than planned. Even two days later we still had to put up with a lot of frustration before we would arrive, but I won't dwell on that.

Upon arrival in Cabarete the weather was fantastic, but we immediately went to bed because it was about 6am and we had been without sleep for at least 24 hours. The wind didn't come through that day, but the following day was easily the best day of riding. The breeze was starting to build right around 11am so I began to rig up my 16m only to find that it had developed a tear in the canopy during the flight. Without missing a beat I had the local "kite caddies" pump up my 10m while I walked over to one of the kite schools for a lesson. Since I've been riding for about 2 years, my instructor Luis focused on getting me riding upwind. By the end of my hour long lesson, I was. This was hands-down the most amazing session I've ever had. There was perfectly warm weather, warm water, great wind, and the most incredible part was seeing the other 60+ kiters on the water as well. Were you to count all of the kites at the other stretches of beach as well, you would count well over 100 kites in the air at any given moment! It was amazing!

Later that afternoon I jumped on a motocoche with my kite caddie Christopher to ride over to this local woman's house who does kite repairs. We left the kite with her over night and came back to pick it up the next morning. The repair was top-notch. The cost...500 Dom. pesos (about $15). I couldn't have asked for a better deal! That afternoon the wind finally picked up and I was able to get a sunset session with about 6 other riders. The solitude of riding while the sun was going down and with the sky turning a deep red was a stark contrast to the chaos of the previous day. However both are equally memorable.

During the rest of our week at Kite Beach Hotel I was only able to get one other short session in between the rain storms. Even with the subpar weather, we had a great time and it was a truly unforgettable trip.