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In January, I went to Punta Cana with my family on vacation. We stayed at a resort called Ocean Blue and Sand. One of the best parts about the resort was all the birds that we saw everyday. The funniest birds were the ones we started to call “the Punta Cana chickens”. These were little black and white water birds with bright orange beaks giant green feet. The could swim really fast and were very agile in the water, but on land they waddled around strangely on their giant feet. The resort had a coffee shop near the lagoon where the birds nested, and every day we went a got bread and baked goods to feed to the Punta Cana chickens. They would all come out of the water to eat the crumbs we threw on the ground. Even some tiny babies came out of the water to eat what we gave them. One of the funniest things is that the Punta Cana chickens were in competition with the turtles for the crumbs. The turtles would come to the water’s edge to get crumbs and the Punta Cana chickens would chase them away. Every day before we had dinner my mom and I would go to the coffee shop to get food to feed these birds. It was one of my favorite memories of our trip. On one of the very last days there, we saw some parents teaching brand new babies to swim. The babies were so small they were mostly bald and they looked both hilarious and cute following the parents around the lagoon.

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One of the strangest sights that I’ve ever seen happened recently when I was waiting for my flight at the Punta Cana airport in January. Our flight was 12 hours delayed so we spent a great deal of time waiting at the airport. While we were eating Wendy’s my mom noticed that a cat ran by. It was a little grey and black cat. Everyone around us was pointing and staring. Some people tried to pet the cat but it wasn’t having any of that. Instead, it was trying to get into the garbage to eat leftover Taco Bell, Wendy’s and Pizza Hut. The airport is open, meaning there are no walls. It leads directly outside so I suppose it wasn’t that unusual that a cat may have gotten in. A little while passed and suddenly I heard my mom say, “There’s another one!” This time it was an orange tabby running between the seats. This one was even more antisocial than the gray one. But people were laughing and pointing. Never in a million years did I ever expect to see TWO cats in an airport. We saw them a few times while we were waiting for our plane that didn’t show up until 1:30 a.m. The wait was long and tiring but seeing the cats made everything a bit more fun. And it gave me a great story to tell once I got back to Canada. Interestingly, there didn’t seem to be any cats at Pearson Airport in Toronto. Even the cats think Canada is too cold.

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Five years ago I went dog sledding in the Haliburton Forest with my aunt, sister and mother. When we went we had an adventure and it was fun… for them at least. Me, on the other hand, didn’t have so much fun. We went on one of the coldest days of the year. All of us were wearing two pairs of socks each. Sadly, that wasn’t enough for me. My feet were frozen and they were covered with bumps. I didn’t get to have the experience of actually dog sledding. But thankfully there was an experienced dog sledder with us so I rode in the basket of his sled instead of riding with my mother so she wouldn’t get hurt. I enjoyed looking at the dogs and the snow. The dogs ran as they were supposed to and I enjoyed the ride. The dogs were fast and sometimes it felt like you would hit the trees because the trail was so narrow. And the dogs were always trying to bump the off the sled drivers so that they could run back to their barn. White fluffy snow covered the trees and the ground. I remember that the air smelt fresh. At one point the trail ended and we rode out onto a frozen lake with nothing around us. Here the dogs ran even faster. Even though the day was super cold, everything felt warm with my pink snow pants and coat on. Well everything except my feet! After we we’re finished dog sledding, we went and saw the dogs in the barn. The dogs were noisy and barked a lot. They used Alaskan malamutes to pull the sleds. Most of their coat colors we’re brown, fawn, raw umber and dark but mostly light shades of grey. We learned that after a time, the dogs are retired and are adopted by families to live lives as pets, relaxing in new homes throughout Ontario. Even though I never really had the full solo sledding experience I still had a great time and I’d love to do it again.