Last night we had a lovely breeze for the concert, and that cool air hung around for a while, but today is going to be hot and humid again. For a change, though, I’ll be happy to abide today’s temperature and grouse less as starting tomorrow it should stay in the 70’s for a bit.

I remember exactly how my dream, my hope, maybe even my expectation, of seeing the world started. I remember being eleven and thinking my geography book was a travel brochure. That was around the same time I caught Barrett’s disease. Its main symptom is travel envy. My classmate, whose last name was Barrett, used to go to England to visit family. I was jealous of him. It was then I vowed to travel far and wide.

On my first morning in Ghana, I saw palm trees. They were exotic and proof I was somewhere I had only imagined. I had jumped into my geography book. I had jumped into Africa.

My longest trip was through South America. I was gone all summer. I landed in Caracas and seven weeks later I left from Rio for home. I didn’t know anyone who had gone there. I just decided that’s where I would go. Maybe Juan Valdez had a piece of that. I planned the trip and traveled with a friend. We saw amazing things. We took a bus from Caracas and traveled all day with a stop for lunch in the mountains. I had mountain trout. We arrived at night to Mérida, Venezuela, one of the main cities of the Venezuelan Andes. The mountains would stay with us most of the trip.

I remember in Bogota we went to the Gold Museum. We were in a vault. The door was closed. The lights were out. When they turned on the lights, we were surrounded by glass cases filled with gold. I think every person Oohed at the same time.

One of my favorite memories is of when we were traveling in Ecuador on what was basically a school bus painted green. We were the only foreigners on it. No one spoke English. We were stopped before the border. The guards wanted our passports. We were in the back of the bus. The other passengers took our passports and hand over hand passed them to the front of the bus and back again. No one spoke to us. They pointed.

We traveled before South America became a destination. During that whole trip we met only one other American. Even at Machu Picchu there were no crowds. We took a three day boat trip down the Paraná River from Asuncion Paraguay to Buenos Aires. We booked the day the boat left. There was plenty of room. For the other passengers it was a round trip. Only one other person on the boat spoke English, and they courteously put us at her table for meals.

I have memories of that trip as big as the mountains and as small as cuy, the Ecuadorian Guinea pig.

This entry was posted on August 11, 2026 at 10:06 am and is filed under Musings. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. Both comments and pings are currently closed.