When my friend Sam started talking about an inexpensive surf trip to Nicaragua, I was intrigued. An adventure in a country that was quite different and traveling with someone that knew the area? It was a little bit of an upsell to get the missus to agree. "Let me get this right, you want me to go along with your friends and their families to a third world country where you will leave me with the women and children while you guys go off surfing all day? What is not to like in that?" I wasn't one hundred percent sure she was serious, but she does like excitement and her idea of a river cruise through Europe, looking at old castles, artwork, and shopping, sounded pretty boring. Once she priced out the two trips, Nicaragua won hands down. She had already booked a dream cruise for us, and cancelled it once she realized this was one third the price. However, I did have to promise a future trip on a river of her choosing, hopefully some day when we are too old for excitement.
Sam had an elaborate plan to show us three different spots on the pacific coast of Nica, mainly for the different famous surf breaks, but also for the locales. The planning part turned out to be easy, traveling with my 9'6" paddleboard was not. In fact we almost missed our flight because I picked the cheapest offsite airport parking I could find....looking back, that place, ParkToFly, would fit perfectly in Nicaragua. They finally came up with a van that could take us and my board and got us to the airport and to American Airlines where I encountered the biggest mess in my memory. I was certain that somebody had hacked their computer system because their system would not give me our boarding passes online, and they were trying to figure out how to do it all with pencil and paper. After ninety minutes of waiting in line with a giant boardbag, the lady typed lazily into her computer, regaling me with stories of her cats and asking if my large bag contained a skimboard. I'm not quite certain what would have happened if I had said yes, but I paid my $150 surfboard fee for them to beat the hell out of my nice new board. It arrived damaged, which is all my own fault, in spite of me spending more than an hour wrapping it up. Fortunately, Sam is expert with epoxy repairs and while we lazed at the hotel pool Managua, my board was made surfable. The upside of this was that I quit worrying about what might happen to my board. It turns out that was a very good thing
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