Posted tagged ‘travel’

« home page
« Older Entries
Newer Entries »

“It’s the unknown that draws people.”

March 11, 2013

Yesterday afternoon the sun came out then went right back behind a cloud. A bit later it did the same thing. Finally the sun reappeared behind another cloud and stayed a while. I could see that strangely familiar bright round orb. My imagination went rampant at its appearance. I imagined riots across the world as people ran from the bright light, all of them absolutely fearful of the unknown.

I checked the weather in the paper today, and it will be cloudy the whole week. I suppose Pollyanna would say, “At least it isn’t snow.” I am a sick of Pollyanna! A good curse or two is a better stress reliever.

I am very late today because I slept until 10:30. I didn’t go to bed until 2. It was just one of those nights. I had some plans today, but now I’ll just stay around and do house things.

The world is so much smaller than it used to be even though there are now more countries than in the history of the world. We can get anywhere in a day. Sadly, though, the world is becoming more homogenized. When I went to Marrakech, I stayed in the old city with its narrow alleyways, and I had to memorize the lefts and rights so I could get back to my riad. The new part of the city has a McDonald’s. In Accra, I saw too many fast food franchises and was sorry to find the hole in the wall Lebanese restaurants where I often ate are gone. You can now find anything you want in Accra, any sort of Bruni food. That makes me sad.

I want to travel to Bolgatanga one more time, probably in a couple of years when I have saved enough money. I also want to see Cambodia, Laos and Cuba before they become a bit like everywhere else. I still like the unbeaten path. Ghana was a bit like that when I first lived there, and it gave me a hunger for places where there are no McDonald’s or neon lights or any of the comforts of home. If I wanted those, I’d just stay home.

Categories: Musings
Tags: , , , , , ,

Comments: 15 Comments

“Travel is more than the seeing of sights; it is a change that goes on, deep and permanent, in the ideas of living.”

March 2, 2013

Today I’ll be at the MultiCultural Festival most of the day. We are having a Peace Corps table and taking turns passing out literature and answering any questions. The event opens with a parade of flags at 9:30, and I’ll be there with the Ghanaian flag. All day long there will be performers from a variety of countries, an international cafe’ and tables selling goods from other countries. I’ve been hankering for a bit of shopping, and this may be just the time.

I have favorite countries and favorite places in other countries. Mind you, all of these do not include Ghana which is, after, all my favorite country second only to home. Today the travelog is my favorite country, Portugal.

We drove as far north as you can go without crossing into Spain. Going through some villages, I had to wait for the green light as the road fit only a single car. Oxen pulled carts were driven on the small roads, and I had to pass them with the utmost caution. The roads were so windy we could see where we’ve been from where we were. I saw Iron Age ruins and Roman ruins still in the process of being excavated. The food was wonderful, and I remember a small restaurant on Easter Sunday where I ate kid. We stayed one night in Nazaré, a fishing village. Women, widows, dressed in black sat along the side of the walk. Dinner was at a restaurant by the water, and through the huge front window we watched the ocean splash over the rocks and the reddest sun go down behind the rocks. Dinner was a whole bowl of shellfish.

In Obidos, we walked the top of the wall surrounding the small village. All of the houses in the old part of the village were white with red roofs. We wandered the narrow streets where we saw small houses covered in colorful flowers.

The town I loved the most was Miranda do Douro, in the northern most part of Portugal. From my room I could see the lights of the Spanish border station. The town reminded me of one in an western movie, one with dirt streets and small buildings close together bordering the road. In the church was a statue of the Christ Child. It has a wardrobe of different outfits, and his clothes are changed periodically. Bougainvillea covered the fronts of house and overhung the wooden fences. Everyone of them was in bloom.

I have always said I won’t visit a country twice (except, of course, for Ghana), but I might just make an exception for Portugal.

 

Categories: Musings
Tags: , , , , , , ,

Comments: 16 Comments

“Come, gentle Spring! Ethereal Mildness! Come.”

February 25, 2013

Today I woke up nearer afternoon than morning. It had been a late night. I watched the Oscars at my friends’ house then came home, checked e-mail and watched a little TV. Before I realized it, the time had slipped away and it was after 3.

Yesterday it poured all day, but last night, as I was going home, the rain had turned to heavy snow and it was slushy and slippery, but right now the day is lovely with blue skies, lots of sun and a bit of warmth. I have feeders to fill, dog food to buy and laundry to do. That’s my agenda for the day. I hope I can manage.

I can see the white flowers of the drooping snowdrops in my garden. They don’t mind snow or cold. They are spring’s first miracle. Other green shoots are just appearing through the soil, but in one part of the front garden, the dafs have grown high. Perhaps yellow buds will be next.

Winter is beginning to weight me down. I am tired of cold and snow. I don’t remember ever before being so anxious for spring. Usually I just hibernate with good books, and I’m fine with that and patient with the weather. Maybe all the rain we’ve had, those days without heat or the heavy snowstorms have pushed me to ache for spring. I want one day when the deck is the perfect spot to be.

I don’t like vacations centered on the beach, even when I’m sick of winter. I want to see things, to eat new food and to hear a language not my own. I like old places, even ancient places. The fun of a new city is wandering and getting lost and finding wonders on the way. Sometimes I take all rights or all lefts. I like to sit in the sun at a table at a sidewalk cafe and drink coffee and watch the world go by. When I shop, I look for the unusual. I take a lot of pictures. I am partial to doors and windows. I always think of the generations of people who looked through those same windows and I wonder what they saw. I walk so much I am exhausted and always fall asleep early.

Today I’ll have no adventures, but I do have some sun and some warmth. I guess that will have to do.

Categories: Musings
Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Comments: 30 Comments

“He who is outside his door already has the hardest part of his journey behind him.”

October 1, 2012

I apologize for the lateness of the hour, but I upgraded my OS today and started to write Coffee on my iPad as the Mac was doing it thing. I wrote the blog but it disappeared. Come to find out I hadn’t put it on the dashboard but in some unknown place which ate the entry. I started again and got most of it written then, glory be to God, my Mac finished so here I am.

This morning I woke up at 8:30 which is the latest I’ve slept since I got home. It felt like the middle of the afternoon.

After I get up, the first thing I usually do is check out my window to see what sort of day Mother Nature has sent us. I was thrilled to see the sun and feel the warm air when I went to get the papers. I came inside and opened both doors. Fern ran to the sun streaming through the front door, and I wanted to join her. Lolling in the sun is a fine way to spend the day.

I keep track of the number of miles I travel each week. When I worked, I generally traveled over 100 miles a week with the comings and goings, the off-cape meetings and the occasional trips to Boston. Last week I managed 48 miles. Some weeks, my sloth or hibernation weeks, I do around 24 miles. At that rate my car will last forever.

I find it a bit intriguing that I am more than willing to travel around the world, but I carp and complain about a trip to Hyannis. It isn’t as if I have to travel far, but that doesn’t matter, I still have to steel myself for the trip. To that end, I always promise myself a treat for having made the trek. Usually it’s a stop at Barnes and Noble or lunch out, sometimes at the Indian restaurant or the Thai place on the way home. I chuckle at the absurdity of it all, but that doesn’t change my reluctance to get on the highway and head to the big city, big at least for these parts. Never could I have visualized that Hyannis would seem the ends of the earth to me.

Categories: Musings
Tags: , , , , ,

Comments: 17 Comments

“Time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana.”

August 16, 2012

Last night was wonderful. First came the rumbles of thunder then the lightning. I went outside on the deck for a while and watched the sky being lit up by small jagged bolts. Every now and then a giant bolt of lightning would surprise me as it spread across the sky and lit the night. It rained, slowly at first then with a bit more intensity. I can always judge the amount of rain fall by Gracie. If she stays out, the rain isn’t much. If she runs in, it must be pouring.

Today is drier than it’s been so the air feels cooler without all the humidity. The breeze is ever so slight. I’m thinking the deck and a book will be perfect for today.

I learned to tell time when I was in the second grade. My aunt taught me. Later I found out why. That aunt, always and forever my favorite aunt, gave me a Cinderella watch for my first communion gift. I remember that watch perfectly. It had a light blue band and Cinderella, the face of my watch, was wearing a light blue gown. She was Princess Cinderella. I was thrilled with that gift and would make a big production of bending my elbow and raising my wrist to my face so I could check the time. I wanted my friends to notice my watch and be jealous.

I don’t wear a watch and haven’t for a long time. I have two of them, both gifts. The one I cherish was a 50th birthday gift from my mother. The watch is beautiful with a red band and silver decorations on it and around the watch, also silver. I wear it as an accessory sometimes, never as a timekeeper. The other watch was the proverbial thanks for your service here is a watch. It was a gift from the district when I retired. On its face is a promo for the district. I never wear that one.

When I travel, I generally bring a watch. I pin it to the inside of my bag. In the old backpacking days, I needed to know the time so I could catch a bus or a train. When I got to Ghana, I found out time there is relative. I needed a watch only to know when to teach. I always woke up early so an alarm wasn’t necessary and when I traveled, buses, other than those run by the country, leave when they’re full so a watch is a waste. It only made me impatient. Ghana has two time zones so to speak: European time and Ghanaian time. The first means the actual hour like be there at seven; the second means whenever you get there. It takes a bit of getting used to, but once you do, it makes life so much easier and far less hectic.

I’ll pin a watch to my bag this trip just as I did last year. I like to know the time when the roosters wake me up.

Categories: Musings
Tags: , , , , , , , , ,

Comments: 15 Comments

If no man could become rich in Peru, no man could become poor.”

July 30, 2012

No movie last night: it was “spitting rain” as my mother would have said so my friends and I played games, ate inside and watched the Olympics. Today is still a bit damp, but I think the sun is making a decided effort to appear. The morning is a lot lighter than it’s been.

We’re still in South America, in Guayaquil, Ecuador. We got here on a small boat from Duran where the auto-bus had finished its run after scaring the heck out of us while showing us the most amazing sights. Guayaquil was hot, and the hotel we found had no screens so I was a mosquito magnet. I don’t remember anything about the city. I just remember swatting and scratching all night. We stayed only a day as the city was really planned as a transit stop. The next day we took another local bus toward the border, and the people were again most accommodating in the passport transfer from the back to the front. We got to the Ecuadorian/Peruvian border too late to cross so we had to stay in Ecuador overnight. That border town reminded me of something out of an old western movie. People were walking out and about all night, and the cantinas were all open and crowded, mostly with men. Our hotel was right on the main drag, a cheap hotel right near the border. For a bathroom it had a hole which necessitated good aim. The hole was out back.

Because I had not slept the night before, I fell sleep right away and heard nothing. My friend was awake most of the night because of the noise and the people walking by our room right on the street. She was a bit frightened by the thought of our room being so central so I think staying up was really a sort of guard duty for her. The next morning we got breakfast and changed dollars into Peruvian sol as the rate was so much cheaper in Ecuador. We got double what we would have gotten into Peru, and knowing we were heading to Machu Picchu, we changed a lot of money. The two of us walked through the border into the first building, passport control. Signs were all over about the amount of Peruvian money you could bring into the country. We were way over the limit. We noticed clothes flung over a screen and realized someone was really being searched. My friend immediately started to panic as we had hidden a lot of money in our bras. I told her to write down on the entry form an amount of money above the limit so we looked honest. That worked. We got a lecture but that was all. The next building was to prove we had a ticket out of Peru before we could come into Peru. Anyone who didn’t was directed to a small building where they were forced to buy bus tickets they’d probably never use. I realized the guy checking tickets spoke no English so I gave him the sheaf of plane tickets, and he flipped through the pile and let me go. I told him my friend was with me, and he hand gestured her a wave out of the building as well. We boarded a bus to Lima.

More tomorrow if you don’t mind.

Categories: Musings
Tags: , , , , ,

Comments: 10 Comments

“The first condition of understanding a foreign country is to smell it.”

July 27, 2012

It rained last night. I didn’t hear it, but I saw the street still wet along the edges when I went to get the papers. Back inside the house again, I opened the door for Gracie who dashed into the yard. I followed but only stood on the deck for a while to gauge the day. Nothing is moving and the sky is cloudy, but the sun seems not so far away.

I have a doctor’s appointment in Hyannis today. I dread the ride. On cloudy days the roads are jammed with cars filled with tourists looking for something to do. Hyannis is a prime destination with its Main Street filled with stores, candy and ice cream shops and t-shirt emporiums. You can even play miniature golf.  Some of the restaurants have outside tables where tourists can sit and eat their hamburgers and watch the crowds pass by. All of those attractions beckon tourists, but they make Hyannis the last place to be on a day like today.

I’ve become insular. I used to go to Boston all the time to see plays or to have dinner, but now I seldom go. I am content to sit on the deck with friends, play a few games and enjoy a barbecue or even just some appetizers. Most nights I watch baseball though that has become painful this summer. When the Sox are down by 5 or more, I have no guilt about changing the station. HGTV and the Food Channel are my escapes from endless reruns and a disappointing season. I even find myself talking HG. My master has no en suite!

I am traveling, and that will give the summer a bit more dimension. When I was teacher, I used to travel every summer usually for at least five weeks. When I become an administrator, I had to work summers so my travel was limited to a week or two at most and usually to only one country. Now I have all the time in the world to see the world. I just need to win the lottery!

Categories: Musings
Tags: , , , ,

Comments: 10 Comments

“Grin like a dog and wander aimlessly.”

June 16, 2012

Sometimes I just want to do nothing. I wake up, figure out what day it is, think about what I have to do and then breathe a sign of relief when I realize I don’t have to do a thing. I use days like today to ride around and see the Cape as if I were a tourist. Other times I shop in some little out-of-the-way place where I can find neat, unusual things as if my house has room for any more.

It is a back and forth sort of day. The sun peeks out of the clouds then hides again. It is only 63° and will be like this for the next few days. Wednesday is supposed to be summer hot. I predict a deck day.

The neighborhood was noisy this morning with the sounds of little kids so I was awakened at 8:00 which wouldn’t be too bad except I went to bed at 2. It was just one of those nights when I wasn’t tired. I watched the cooking channel.

Once in a while I get this urge to travel and I just want to go. The destination is unimportant. It is the going which I crave. It is needing to tend to my affliction, my wanderlust. My passport is always up-to-date just in case. My car is gassed. It would take all of five minutes to pack my bag: toothbrush, underwear, a couple of shirts and a clean pair of slacks would do me fine. I know I have a trip in August, but that feels like a long time away.

If I were exiled to an island and could bring whatever I needed to sustain me, I’d have books and music, expecting, of course, that the food would be provided as well as an unlimited supply of batteries (it is, after all, my daydream). A beach chair by the ocean would a wonderful place to while away my exile. Maybe I’d live in a thatched treehouse, a Tarzan sort of place where he and Jane had set up housekeeping. I’d swim by the reef, and I’d do a little a little fishing from my chair. My rod would be stuck in the sand so I’d have little to do but pull in dinner. Interesting debris would wash up on the shore, and I’d decorate my thatched house with the oddities brought by the tides.

I know that wouldn’t happen, especially the batteries, so I’ll settle for my deck, an oasis, an island, in the back of my house. Right now the sun is shining, the birds are at the feeders, and my deck looks like the perfect place to spend a little time with my book and my music.

I think my life is wonderful and I even like the feeling of wanderlust. It keeps me from ever being bored.

Categories: Musings
Tags: , , , , , , ,

Comments: 16 Comments

“The Sun, with all the planets revolving around it, and depending on it, can still ripen a bunch of grapes as though it had nothing else in the Universe to do.”

April 27, 2012

When I opened the front door this morning, the sun came pouring in then just a little bit later it disappeared. It’s appeared again, and Fern is lying straight out on her back basking in the sun. A breeze makes the day seem colder than it is and is strong enough to sway the bird feeders, but the birds don’t seem to mind. Male goldfinches with their bright yellow chests, a pair of cardinals, my friends the chickadees and the nuthatches and titmice are all dropping by for a late breakfast.

I have nothing planned for today. I’m thinking a sloth day. I’ll make my bed, brush my teeth, feed the animals and that’s about it. I see an afternoon nap in my future.

There are leaves on the top of the oak tree near the deck. The leaves are tiny, but I don’t care. They are the first stirrings of spring in my yard beyond the blooming of the bulbs I planted last fall. Some of my neighbors’ trees are already leafy, but those trees sit where the sun warms them most of the day. I think it won’t be long before my trees are leafy enough to hide the deck, and I’ll be back to sitting in a tree house high above the ground.

When I see movies where one of the characters is told to pack a bag, grab her passport and leave on the next plane, I always wish I had a job like that, one where exotic places become almost commonplace, and I know the best restaurant where the locals eat, probably a small place on a side street that only a discerning eye could find. I guess I’d have to be a spy for such spontaneous flight as a job in business would be far more planned. No question about it: I’d be better suited for being a spy than a businesswoman.

My trunk is filled with the week’s trash, litter and recyclables, but I’m not going to the dump. Last week I went on Friday and upset the fragile balance of my world. Gracie and I will wait for tomorrow and all will be right with our world.

Categories: Musings
Tags: , , , , , , ,

Comments: 11 Comments

“Demoniac frenzy, moping melancholy, / And moon-struck madness.”

November 15, 2011

It is another warm day, but this one has sun and blue skies. Rain is possible later so I need to get out and about before the rain starts. I want to take full advantage of the wonder of a warm day this late in November.

My deck is filled with piles of leaves as is my lawn. I couldn’t help myself this morning when I went to get the papers. I shuffled through those leaves the same way I used to when I was a kid on my way to school. I’d walk in the gutter beside the sidewalk and kick the leaves as I walked. I loved watching the leaves scatter and hearing the sounds they made underfoot. It was the same this morning.

My brother-in-law Rod called me from the road last night to chat. He, who lives in Colorado, is in Minnesota for business. He travels at least two weeks a month. I told him I was in a bit of a funk, and he laughed and wondered how I could be as I had just returned from my trip to Africa. I whined and complained that it was nearly three months ago. Save my pennies was his advice. I think he’s right. I have a bug, a bit of African flu, and it can only be cured by returning to Ghana. I’m setting my sights to return in a year and a half which will give me time to collect enough of those pennies he mentioned.

Yesterday was a nothing day. I didn’t even make my bed. I did brush my teeth and changed from one set of cozies to a clean set of cozies. Today is different.  I’ve already showered, done laundry, gotten dressed, polished a couple of tables and made my bed. I think of it as fit of frenzy. Maybe I need medication.

Categories: Musings
Tags: , , , ,

Comments: 6 Comments

« Older Entries
Newer Entries »