Granada: crossing paths with a blast from the past

If you have been following my blogs for some amount of time, or actually know me pretty well as a person, you have the knowledge that camp was and still is a huge part of who I am. Being a camp counselor was by far the best decision I have ever made. I made friends from all over the world, discovered my love for kids, passion for people, the real meaning of exhaustuation, sparked my interest in travel and overall gave me some of the best summers of my life. My first summer at Sandy Hill in 2007 I met a a lot of amazing people, including Rena my soulmate best friend.
Some of the rest of these people where the Martin's. Martin from Germany, Martin from Sweden and Martin from Scotland. The fact that they had the same names put an obvious mark of fate that they had to be best friends, and honestly to this day I have met a more perfect trio. They dominated the varsity boy two-weekers with their admirable devotion to the weekly dance, flag pole, cabin clean up, dinning hall "give me one" as well as the talent show. Always bringing new dance moves, grotesque methods of making the girls gag at the talent shows, as well as finding a variety of ways to round up their 16 year olds and do something mischievous just to the line where Greg (our beloved camp director) would give the eye while holding back a smile. Camp loved them.

They even created an "I love Martin" stencil and charged campers for them to spray paint their official logo onto whatever clothing item they wanted. Pure genius.

I was "privileged" enough to become really good friends with the Martin's that summer and counselor free time added a whole new level of epic. Baltimore, New York City, Washington DC were a handful of places we scurried about on our days off. By the end of the summer we decided to add a finale trip to an already perfect summer. Martin Hayes' family had a beach house in Sarasota, Florida and it was ours if we wanted it. Was that really even a question? The crew changed all our flights home for a glorious 10 days extravaganza of Florida sunshine.

One Scot, one German, one Swed, one Aussie, one Canadian, one American and two Kiwis. It was a shit show to say the least.

Apparently I hadn't had enough of Martin hilarity so I flew myself all the way to Germany the following winter to hang Martin Steinhoff. German Martin and I, then flew on over to Scotland where we found Martin Hayes and even Zoe (one of the kiwi's in our summer posse)! 

In the day and age of Facebook Martin saw that I was in Nicaragua and that the planets would align and he would be in Granada (three hours away from me). Que emocionante! So I bused myself to Granada and we played for the weekend. We went to a bar that played a lot of Michael Jackson, drank shots that were on fire and walked in circles back to the hostel. We recovered by floating in tubes on Laguna De Apoyo and continuing the drinking later that evening. In the midst of catching up Martin told me he was moving to Australia in January to find a job with his newly acquired architecture degree. Oh how wonderful, in that I plan to be in Australia around March next year. So we scheduled another "banter" for the following year. The next day I showed Martin around Granada being that I am now a Nicaraguan veteran. Then I headed back to Leon in the same manner the buses always do, half hugging Martin while they half pull me onto the bus while never truly coming to a complete stop. I waved goodbye and said "See you in Australia!"I find myself saying things like that to a lot of my friends lately. I like that.

 Next stop Australia!