How to get there from here

Taking turns seems to come naturally to the people who use this bridge - whether they're on foot or on horseback.  This is the main connection point between a small community some miles away from Bluefields and no community at all.  

People use this bridge to get into 'town' to shop or to sell what they've grown or produced or to get medical treatment or supplies for the house or farm...things that many of us have nearby - or if not nearby at least easily accessible by paved roads and cars.

It had rained heavily the morning of this visit and I'd already slipped in the mud.  

This was a bridge too far.

Rosewood cups

I've had these cups for several years.  They are another addition to my household crafted by the Lopez family, the same craftsmen who carved the wooden spatulas I wrote about a couple of stories ago.

The cups are about the size of a grown man's fist.  Each one is carved from a chunk of rosewood.  Of all the rosewood things I have brought home from Nicaragua's southern autonomous region, I've never had a piece of rosewood so dark and in which the 'rose' in rosewood is so clearly exhibited.  There's a patch of that rather incredible color in each cup.

Other than a light coating of linseed oil these cups have had no treatment.  Long ago I asked that the Lopez family leave untreated any wood thing they make for me.   I asked for that after I learned that lots of handcrafted wooden items, most everywhere, are routinely stained with shoe polish...including things made of rosewood.

I recently pulled these out of storage and hit them briefly with very fine sandpaper.  I'm getting ready to coat the inside of the cups with clear food grade epoxy and for sure some epoxy will go where it's not supposed to go...so I'll be using the sandpaper again in a couple of weeks.

No problem.

Plenty of necessary stuff in Bluefields

Obviously there aren't any hardware stores at False Bluff.  There's almost nothing at False Bluff except us...certainly not a hardware store. 

But Bluefieds is an easy 8 miles by water from where we are on the edge of the Caribbean; and I'm glad to say that Bluefields has a lot of necessary stuff, including hardware stores.  

Some of the hardware stores are small and sell no paint.  Some are small and manage to sell paint anyway.  Some are big - for Bluefields - and sell hardware and paint.  And some of the big ones have more than one location...not far away from each other because Bluefields is too small for anything to be far away.  

For instance, one of my 'go to' spots is in the center of town.  This particular store has a mostly hardware location in the middle of one block with a mostly paint location right across the street from the mostly hardware location.  Plus there is a third location right around the corner from both of those places.  The third location of the disjointed hardware store includes a mix of heavy and big stuff - like piles of bagged concrete and cinder blocks, or 2500 liter water tanks.  

Sometimes it's difficult to know that all three of these separate locations add up to one store - particularly when totally different stores are often right beside one of the three locations mentioned above...or right across the street.  

And you can't buy your lumber from hardware stores regardless of what other stuff the hardware stores might deal in.  You buy your lumber from a mill.  But that's OK since there are a fair number of these in Bluefields as well.  

The bottom line is that there's a lot of stuff for sale whether you're building from the ground up, repairing something, or renovating.   And it doesn't matter if a particular part of one store sells only paint and the place you get your new water tank is right next door but owned by somebody else.  It all does the job for you when you get the stuff home or to the job site.  

And moving the stuff is a whole different story because if you don't own a truck or can't get a 2500 liter water tank in - or on top of - your taxi, you end up renting a truck to take the stuff where you want it to go.  The multitudes of commercial carriers sitting at the sides of the roads all over town are handy.  They're all waiting to be hired to haul something for you.  Each of them seems to come with a driver and two helpers.

By the way...if you should end up shopping in the 'go to' spot I described above (yes, the place is real), you might be grateful for the fact that there is a cafe on the second floor of one of their locations...upstairs.  It either overlooks the street or some containers of termite killer, depending on where you sit.  Having a meal or just a cold drink in the cafe is a nice way to end a shopping trip....before your carrier arrives to haul your stuff wherever it needs to go.

The hardware store pictured below is one of the smaller ones and it's not in the center of town.  But it's loaded with supplies...many more than are displayed in the picture.

The city house, a necessary clean up, a kick ass view

The 'new' house needed a considerable amount of clean up following a glancing visit by Hurricane Ian.  The first chore was to remove the pieces of a huge breadfruit tree which had fallen onto the roof.  The breadfruit tree had three trunks and was big around and very tall.  The loss of the tree was mitigated by the fact that for years the fruit was way too high up to harvest.

The structural damage to the house was minimal; the mess in the yard was maximum.  Since the breadfruit tree branches had intertwined with those of other trees in the yard, almost everything else came down with or beause of the breadfruit tree.  

 

The last of the trees and all of their parts, big and small, young and old, were cut and loaded into a boat for disposal.  The last tree to go was another that the hurricane had put down.  That tree had ended up falling in the bay instead of in the yard or on the house roof.

The clean up exposed a kick ass view of the bay as well as part of the Bluefields itself.  This will be nice to live with.

Life on the bay

The small city of Bluefields, Nicaragua, sits on a bay - called of all things - Bluefields Bay.  Lots of stuff important to the commercial life of Bluefields takes place along or in that body of water.  One important place is the main wharf where almost everything that came into Bluefields arrived...until the new road opened just a couple of years ago.  

Need a new car?  Need an order of tiles for your hardware store?  Need the latest fashions for your clothing outlet?  For us, more than a decade ago, our pontoon boat kit from South Carolina, arrived at the city's main wharf.  All of this stuff came to the wharf pictured below.

Granted, some of the stuff came on a bus or a boat by way of the El Rama Port.  Actually most stuff that went through the port at Rama involved both bus and boat. Some small stuff came by air.  But fewer and fewer goods travel these ways now that there is a roadway connecting Bluefields to Managua.  

But even so, the main wharf is still very busy.  It accomodates large boats and barges and deals primarily with things that don't come from Managua.  

And attached to the main wharf is the water taxi terminal that carries people by panga to small communities which can't easily be reached by car or bus.  

Replacing a roof because of a hurricane? Sort of but mostly because of a tree

Hurricane Ian hit Nicaragua last fall.  More than a decade ago when I was hunting for a piece of property on Nicaragua's Caribbean coast I fielded a lot of questions about hurricanes.  Most people think Nicaragua is constantly bombarded by hurricanes during the season.  For a brief while I assumed that was true. 

Turns out we do have our share of bad weather but it's mostly inconvenient rain - rarely hurricanes.  When a hurricane forms off the coast of Africa and heads west, most often it hits the islands on the eastern edge of the Caribbean.  Usually from those pieces of land that edge the Caribbean a hurricane seems to bounce off and up.   At the end of each hurricane season NOAA publishes a one page summary of what kind of storms went where.  

That summary page (sample below) looks like someone dropped a handful of colorful cooked spaghetti on a map. The different colors represent the types of storms.  I took advantage of more than 100 years of this data to look at Nicaragua's hurricane history.  If I was going to invest anything there - time, money, hard work, etc - I wanted to know what I was getting into.  Turned out that as far as hurricanes were concerned I wasn't getting into much.  In fact I was getting into less in Nicaragua than I get into living in Virginia.

If and when a hurricane does hit Nicaragua, the hit is most often north of False Bluff and near where Nicaragua and Honduras meet.  I have no idea why.  Maybe because that northern part of Nicaragua sticks out into the Caribbean the farthest.  

False Bluff, on the other hand, is south, tucked away from the pathway of most hurricanes.  We're way south on that coast...only about 40 miles from Costa Rica.  Hurricane paths are a mystery to me- but a mystery I don't have to solve.

Of course 'rarely' doesn't mean 'never' and we took a hit this year.  Much of the 'thatch' on the main building 'left the building.'  And nearby trees from which this leaf is harvested also 'left the building.'   The trees themselves were either blown down or the trees stood and the fronds were blown off.  Our roofer had to travel pretty far to harvest the more than 3000 fronds we needed.  The extra distance cost both time and money.  

And it turned out that damage to the roof wasn't directly caused by wind but to an avocado tree BEHIND the house.  The wind knocked the tree smack across the middle of the house, the spine of the roof as it were.  So there was also damage to the rafters.  

The original rafters had been round poles and we couldn't easily find replacements for those, near or far.  Granted, had time not been an issue we might have located them.  But people live in this building.  

One thing we had in our favor - a silver lining as it were - was all the downed trees.  We just sliced up enough downed trees to replace the rafters.  Using nominal and often green lumber is nothing new in this area.  So the rafters were extricated from trees on the ground and the framing went up while we waited for delivery of the leaf fronds.

All done.  By now the entire house has two coats of primer, known in Bluefields as 'sealer.'  Painting to follow.

Miss Lizzie beat the odds: life expectancy

I've read stories lately about the declining life expectancy in the United States. Covid and opioids and fentanal get a lot of the blame. Be that as it may, people in the US seem to be dying younger…some of us are dying 'suddenly' or are in the category of 'excess deaths.'

A story about this, published last month, includes a map, graphs, lists, and links to additional information:

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-11627841/Where-does-state-rank-terms-life-expectancy.html

The information in the story above, amassed by NiceRx, a supplier of discount prescription drugs, shows that people who live in Hawaii have the longest life span at 81.  Number one and the others in the top ten list are shown here, although the ties among some states means it's not a top ten list but a top fourteen list:

The ten (fourteen, really) US states with the best life expectancy:

  1. Hawaii - 80 years and eight months

  2. Washington - 79 years and two months

  3. Minnesota - 79 years and a month

  4. California, Massachusetts and New Hampshire - 79 years 

  5. Oregon, Vermont - 78 years and nine months 

  6. Utah - 78 years and seven months

  7. Connecticut, Idaho - 78 years and five months

  8. Colorado - 78 years and four months

  9. Rhode Island - 78 years and three months

 10. Maine - 77 years and nine months

The ten (eleven) US states with the lowest life expectancy: 

  1. Mississippi - 71 years and 11 months

  2. West Virginia - 72 years and 10 months

  3. Louisiana - 73 years and a month

  4. Alabama - 73 years and two months

  5. Kentucky - 73 years and six months

  6. Tennessee, Arkansas - 73 and 10 months

  7. Oklahoma - 74 years and a month

  8. New Mexico - 74 years and six months

  9. South Carolina - 74 years and 10 months

 10. Indiana - 75 years

Harvard chimed in with more details about the decline:

https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/why-life-expectancy-in-the-us-is-falling-202210202835

What I find interesting is that Nicaragua's life expectancy is higher than any of the eleven states shown on the 'lowest life expectancy' list above...at more than 75 years.  Nicaragua’s life expectancy has been steadily increasing for the past 50 years:

https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/NIC/nicaragua/life-expectancy

I don’t know if any of this is information is valid but it is interesting. I’ve met lots of people, men and women, in the part of Nicaragua where I hang out who are living - independently - in their 90s.

The longevity information was published within days of the release of a Gallup poll that rated Nicaragua as the number one country where citizens feel at peace.  My guess is that feeling at peace may be contributing to the increasing life expectancy of Nicaraguans:

https://mronline.org/2023/01/11/nicaragua-is-worlds-1-country-where-citizens-feel-at-peace-gallup-poll-shows/

One old person in Bluefields whom I never got to meet but have admired from stories about her was Ivy Elizabeth Forbes Nelson, known as Miss Lizzie.  She was born in 1921 and died at home in 2021.  I'm told she kept dancing nearly to the end.  

This is who she was and how she is lovingly known:

"An Interview with Miss Lizzie"

 https://youtu.be/aM6HXl8ygBA

Mr Allen and the new dock

Even before Hurricane Ian made landfall just a few miles north of us, Mr. Allen had been working to replace our public dock.  The thing was built shortly before our canal was finished and made open to the public...more than a decade ago.  

The dock had taken a lot of hard use from people, boats, machetes, weather, etc.  We don't use it.  We had built it specifically for the public and then just kind of forgot about it while doing all sorts of other work. The original public dock began to decline but as long as it was still usuable we pretty well ignored it.  

One of its regular users, our excellent neighbor Mr. Allen, began lobbying other landowners and the increasing number of members of the public who sometimes just make a day trip to the beach.  His intent was to build a brand new dock.  He explained to those he contacted that since we had opened and routinely maintain a mile of canal...and had originally built the public dock...we should not have to also be responsible for a dock we never use, but that instead the work should fall to those who do use it.    

Mr. Allen visited other people one at a time both in Bluefields and up and down the beach, asking that they contribute time or materials or money.  After Hurricane Ian's visit the work became imperative. We cleared and re-opened the canal for boat travel - but people who had produce or livestock to carry to market had no way to load their goods.  Thanks to Mr. Allen there is a new dock.  (Remnants of the old dock are visible along the side of the new one.)

Not only was he successful in having a new dock built. he improved on the original design.  The old dock was so tall that sometimes getting in or out of a boat was tricky.  The new dock is not as tall and has steps to make boarding and loading much easier.

Family and the rosewood spatulas

For more than a decade, each trip I've made to False Bluff has included a visit with the Lopez family.  

Mr. Julio and his son Mr. Julio Jr and a grandson create lovely and sometimes useful, sometimes just decorative, things out of wood and shell - coconut shells and various sea shells:  jewelry and figurines and bowls and cups and walking canes.  

Basically if I can think of it, someone in the Lopez family can make it.  Stories about pieces of their work that have traveled from Bluefields (where they live) to Virginia (where I live) are woven throughout this blog.  And I've seen some of the family's work on display in the Nicaraguan embassy in Washington, DC.

One of my favorite pieces is the horse part of a hobby horse carved of teak.  The rockers never were added to the horse part because the piece overall didn't meet Mr. Julio's standards...but the horse part made the base of a nice low seat.  It was dumped directly into the dirt where it became part of a bench - until I unearthed it, wrapped it up, and took it to Virginia where it hangs on a wall in my living room. A picture is somewhere on this site.

During my most recent trip I met with Mr. Julio Jr and asked him to make me five wooden spatulas.  A spatula made of teak has been part of my kitchen arsenal for so long that its useful part had been worn in size to the point that the useful life was nearly over.  

So I took a picture of what was left, with a tape measure beside it.  When I showed the picture to him he said, "Sure.  No problem."  I kept one of the five that I brought home and am already using it...stirring stew and flipping grilled cheese sandwiches.  The other four spatulas were gifts to family members: two to siblings, two to children.  

These aren't teak.  They're rosewood.  

And all five of the spatulas I brought home were cut from the same chunk of wood, sliced like bread to become useful artifacts that may spend part of their useful lives not just having been sliced like bread but in contact with real bread.  

But the really special thing about this kitchen utensil is that it ties, in a small way, all five of us immediate family members together.  Each of us has one of these cut from the same piece of rosewood in Nicaragua.  

What a strange connection.

Note:  It's just over 12" long and about 1/4" thick not counting the taper at the more useful end.  The rosewood was part of a tree in the Lopez back yard.

Purina

During a recent visit to Nicaragua I tagged along with friends on a Sunday trip to a small and somewhat isolated community about 40 minutes from Bluefields.  The new road from Bluefields to Nueva Guinea makes such visits a whole lot easier.  

But even with cars and trucks traveling the road, NIC-71, most people in tiny communities like this one still travel on horseback - although there's been a huge increase in motorcycles here since my only other visit some years ago.  

Not much, if any, of the infrastructure has changed but now even on Sunday you can shop at the local Purina dealership.

A can...in a bottle

Twelve fluid ounce cans of Coca Cola or Pepsi is what we are accustomed to finding on shelves - at least throughout Virginia.  Maybe throughout the entire United States.  And twelve fluid ounces is 355 mL (yes, the L is not lowercase).  

But I discovered these little things in Bluefields on a recent trip.  Actually they're available in the airports in Managua which is pretty much the only place I am when I'm in Nicaragua if I'm not in the southern autonomous region.  

Not just the colas come in these small bottles.  You can also find Lipton tea and some of the Fantas.

These are nice.  Easier to carry and less to drink.  Plastic vs aluminum?  Always a debate.

And they're inexpensive.  The number on the cap in the second photo below is 16, not 76....that's the price.  Sixteen cordoba.  Today the exchange rate is 36.37 Nicaraguan cordoba to $1 U.S. dollar.  The math is pleasant.  

Can't find these little bottles anywhere in my Virginia city.  

Yet.

Bay House Post Hurricane

 Work continues on the new house in town.  A lot of cleaning had already been completed and the plan was to leave as much existing vegetation as possible while making the upgrades.  Then the hurricane hit.  A lot of damage was done including blowing the top out of the largest tree and having it land on the house.  A lot of cutting has been done to all the damaged trees.

The below picture is the front of the house with the top of the tree from the back yard on it.

Lots more cutting.

Lots more cleaning.

Last damaged tree being removed.  Majority clean now.

Happy Holidays, New Friends, and New Neighborhoods!

 If you are reading this we hope you have Happy Holidays!

We hope you get to spend time with friends, family, and new neighbors.

NO PHOTOS

Until earlier this year, Covid had interrupted all work - to a certain extent even routine maintenance - on our project at False Bluff.  We planted and pruned and cleaned.  But even building repairs were deferred and for sure, completion of the rental cabins just came to a screeching halt.

Then, during an earlier trip this year I got things started up.  A lot of repairs to existing buildings and a giant step for mankind toward the completion of our first two rental cabins.

And then Ian came to visit and we took an almost direct hit.  Damage was much worse a bit north of us but we lost the roof on our largest building and there was some other building-related damage...just after new work had been done.

But the biggest damage was to our canal, access we provided for many many people when we dug the canal more than a decade ago.  Hundreds and hundreds of trees down, blocking the canal and all the people who depend on it to get where they're going.  

Cleaning and clearing took precedence and my incredible staff had that canal open again in less than 10 days.  There were no chainsaws to be had anywhere in the area...not to rent, not to borrow.  So we now own just about the larget chainsaw Stihl makes.  

The solution to the canal problem went like this:  get the saw from Managua and have a party.  We called for volunteers among the people who use the canal...come help clean this up and we'll feed you.  And thus it happened.  Sure, there's more to the story and there was a lot of heavy work but there was also a celebratory feeling to the event.

We cut and moved huge quantities of large trees and hired a man who is an artist with his own chainsaw.  He cuts trees like I would cut a block of cheese.  Need some 2 x 4s?  Here you go.  How about some 2 x 12s.  No problem.  We have enough green lumber - treated and stacked to dry - to build several more cabins.  And since people work with green lumber in this part of the world, some of the fallen trees even became the new framework for the roof that had to be replaced.

But I don't have a single decent photo to share of any of this.

LA COSTENA

La Costena is Nicaragua's only domestic airline.  Based in Managua, La Costena carries passengers to mostly Nicaraguan locations:  Big Corn Island, San Carlos, Bluefields, Bonanza, Ometepe, Puerto Cabezas, Siuna, San Juan de Nicaragua, Waspan, and the non-Nicaraguan city of Tegucigalpa which is the capital of Honduras.  I have read that at one time Avianca owned a part of La Costena from 2010 but sold their portion of the smaller airline in 2019.   

La Costena has proven to be a very "user friendly" organization with good person to person communication.  Until recently it's been suffering because of past covid shut downs...but covid regulations spread suffering everywhere.  Before covid's unnecessarily onerous burdens on the tourism business, La Costena offered two flights a day between Managua and Bluefields. 

Their early afternoon departure from Managua was timed so that people arriving there on their way to the Carribbean could get to both Bluefields and/or Big Island.  As it is now, most people spend their arrival night in Managua and catch the early/only flight to Bluefields and/or Big Island. Bit by bit La Costena is adding the second flight back to their list...so far only on Sundays and a few Saturdays. Hopefully a busy tourist season will see these flight additions happen for all the other days of the week.

When I last checked in for my La Costena flight to Bluefields I asked the woman at the counter how business was. Her reply was "Better, thank god." This photo shows how the waiting room in Managua looked when I sat down to await my flight. By the time the flight was called the room was full, as it should be...full of mostly European tourists headed for Big Island (and perhaps from there on to their boat ride to Little Island, a place to small for any airplane).

Drupes...who knew - and who cares

    Cashew nuts aren't really nuts...they're drupes.  

    It turns out there is all sorts of confusing classification and nomenclature regarding what I've long thought of simply as nuts.  Cashews aren't nuts.  Peanuts aren't nuts.  Almonds aren't nuts.  Acorns are classified as nuts but not many people eat acorns the same way people eat cashews or peanuts or almonds.

    By definition a drupe is a fruit that's fleshy on the outside but with a shell covering the outside of the seed of the fruit - the cashew in this case.  

    A very different thing about a cashew is that although the seed is, indeed, covered with shell...in the case of the cashew, a really hard shell...the seed isn't on the inside of the fruit.  Instead the cashew seed hangs from the bottom of the fruit, one per.  My guess is that over the eons the cashew seed shell got really hard since it's not on the inside of the fruit that produces it.  Protection, you know.

    Peaches are drupes and the peach seed is very much an "innie."  People eat the outside of the peach, the fleshy part of the drupe; but I doubt there are a lot people who eat the seed that's inside.  With a cashew, the seed is an "outie" and hangs from the bottom of the fleshy part of the drupe.  And the fleshy part of the cashew is commonly called a "cashew apple."   

    The common naming of the cashew fruit as an apple just adds more confusion to classification and names since the cashew is not at all kin to an apple.  They're not even in the same family.  The cashew tree family is Anacardiaceae while the apple tree family is in the Rosaceale.  (This is really important stuff here.)

    At False Bluff we have trees that produce both red and yellow cashew apples which make for really good eating.  However, like the fruit of the pawpaw tree, a US native, a cashew apple is very fragile...too fragile to make it to a grocery store shelf in any appetizing way.  

    So we just pick and eat the cashew apple right off the tree.  And like the fragile pawpaw, the apples of the cashew tree make wonderful jams and jellies.

    We simply don't bother with the cashew seeds though....those things that are labeled "nuts" and are so very expensive in grocery stores.  There are several reasons for the cost of the things - but that's another story.

VACCINES IN BLUEFIELDS (WITH NATIONAL STATS)

Most everywhere there is still a push to vaccinate people against covid. Even in Bluefields, anybody who wants a vaccine can get a vaccine.

Vaccinators wander through town - and most likely the surrounding rural areas - offering on-the-spot vaccinating and are willing to discuss the benefits and reasons for being vaccinated with anyone who might still have never heard of covid.

There was a small representative crew from the local health department offering vaccines and information during a Bluefields street festival I attended. There were lots of people out and about. These three were not at all aggressive in their efforts but they stood out because they were nearly the only people out that day who were wearing masks.

On August 10, 2022, the all-time covid stats for Nicaragua were:

• 14,872 cases and
• 244 deaths

The US State Department page includes the following CDC statement regarding Nicaraguan covid information: "The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has determined Nicaragua has an unknown level of COVID-19."

Note:  The CDC statement on the State Department page does not identify as sarcasm

Rooflines

The first thing I noticed when I got to the Avianca location in Miami International Airport for my first flight with that airline was the curve in the ceiling and the roof.  The curves in both were familiar and comforting, like being at home because that's a pretty typical roof line in Bluefields, Nicaragua.

Avianca, MIA

BICU, Bluefields Indian and Caribbean University 

Hotel Escuela BICU 

When I began to look at available information about this roof style I learned the following:

• there is a reduced emission of harmful CO2 gases; 
• the roof construction is relatively easy to build;
• the roofs are quite wind resistant;
• there is always an increase of air flow through the building (I can verify this is pretty nice in areas where air conditioning is not the norm);
• and - long thought to be true, but now in question - the roof shape transfers more heat away from the building than peak-roofed buildings

Papaya

     We have lots of papaya trees at False Bluff.  They grow fast from seed and bear fruit early....two nice characteristics.

     The fruit is either big or not big, depending on the variety of the tree; and we have both varieties.

     This is a just-peeled papaya from one of the trees that produces big fruit - and it's a pretty typical size for the variety.

     I'm sure there is a taste difference between the varieties but I can't tell.  However, I prefer the big fruit because there's so much more to eat - and that means everybody gets a huge bowl full like this.

AVIANCA - some airlines never stopped flying to Nicaragua

American Airlines recently announced they will begin flying to Managua again - after more than two years.  The airline made it official enough so that it showed up on the US state department page.

So I booked a flight using a ticket I had purchased more than two years ago.  However, I'm keeping my fingers crossed since that ticket was repeatedly put on hold as the "we're going to fly to Managua" statements turned out to not be true.

Prior to American's announcement, flight craziness for travel between the USA and Nicaragua nudged us into trying Avianca for the first time in our years of traveling there. The differences were like anything different...they took a bit of getting used to.  But overall we have been both surprised and pleased.

Part of the surprise was that Avianca served a meal...not just two cookies or a half ounce of tiny pretzels...but food. Not hot on a plate with utensils and a napkin...but food.

Another of the 'differences' was where in the grand scheme of the Miami airport (MIA) Avianca is actually located. We're accustomed to more than a decade of the "D" gates. Avianca gates are "F" and are about as far from D as you can get.

Although the drawing of MIA, below, shows D and F are pretty close together, getting to F from D is not as simple as it looks. Good exercise though. So, in the future, we will probably take the cheapest flight to Miami and then Avianca from Miami to Managua. The walk will do us good and we'll save a bit on trip insurance since we just won't bother with insurance on the flight to or from Miami.