I was digging around for a photo from last year and came across this...I was pretty pleased with myself for making these saint candles for a few of my colleagues for the holidays.
(Note it's always a pencil, not a cigar which is weirdly what people see if they don't look closely.)
I would like this house, please. But for the 2015 price of $140k.
(Which gives some context for how I was able to afford my own Jersey City house in May, 2015.)
Here are some Bonaire photos I took with my new point-and-shoot camera. It's got a pretty good zoom lens. I headed up to fishing village Playa Frans in my rental truck because the national park is closed on Mondays, and Playa Frans is at the end of a dirt road that ends at the park.
Also! A bit of iPhone video of a bunch of donkeys at the donkey sanctuary. And then a drive back to the other end of the island for another look at the salt flats.
Here are some other photos of my day.
I am delighted to report that BETTER LIVING THROUGH BIRDING by America's Sweetheart Christian Cooper is a marvelous, heartfelt, thoughtful, and highly entertaining read.
I accidentally bought two versions, meaning I dutifully went to the bookstore and bought the hardcover on release day, but then I didn't want to carry it on the plane so I bought the Kindle version too. But I'm happy to have done so...it's so good.
I was like...can I really read this giant book about...birds? But birds are Chris' passion, and he makes them fascinating through his framework of family, work, travel, nerd life, romance, and his own personal journey. (Of course, I'm a sucker for the travel parts.) And also...humor! I fondly recall when in his web comic Queer Nation, Chris named a portal character Calgon, and many many episodes later, another character said "Calgon, take me away!" And I laughed and laughed.
That's dedication to the long joke game. Maybe you had to be there, but the point is Chris is funny and charming in his book, just like in real life.
Wholeheartedly recommended, no notes.
I flew back to LAX last night…here’s what it’s like coming through the clouds at 11 pm on 4th of July.
I’m a sucker for a container ship. I traveled on four of them during my first round-the-world trip in 2001.
There’s nothing quite like slow ground-level travel. In Bonaire, container ships bring nearly everything (except for fish and donkeys). Here’s one moored at town center at sunset last night.
But Air Century had my name and that was all that mattered.
I was in Curacao Airport an hour later, where my next problem was getting through in time for my Bonaire-bound flight 70 minutes later. I sailed through the new e-gates and was at Divi Divi Air's check-in line in no time. I'm lucky I was dealing with tiny planes and not some 200-seater. There were no delays.
The Uber Hyundai had a giant container of…natural gas? LP? in the trunk. The driver said no ingles, but his phone gave him English directions.
I had airport coffee machine cappuccino and Mini Chokis (Clasico) and granola cookies for desayuno, using my last DR pesos post-security. Breakfasts of champions always remind me of desperately snacking on Pringles and Pepsi when the road down from Machu Picchu was blocked while I was there.
I spent last night on the phone with my ticket's travel vendor, unconvinced I actually had an airline ticket. The name of the airline and flight number didn’t match the only 8 a.m. flight from Santo Domingo’s small airport to Curacao.
Somehow it all worked, though my tight connection from CUR-BON became my new concern.
I’m not one to let an opportunity to travel pass me by, especially since I’m on a quest to see corners of the world I have to work a bit to get to. Islands fall into this category since one does not just happen upon them when visiting nearby.
I’ve been trying to get out of my SoCal comfort zone (aka Mexico) and see new-to-me countries. Sometimes they aren’t countries, like when I went to Curacao and Aruba, to New Caledonia. But to me, those are every bit as novel. Other times, my destinations are absolutely countries—Vanuatu, Luxembourg, and now…Dominican Republic.
I caught a Thursday night flight to Santo Domingo. I did “work from home” on Friday from an AirBnB in the Zona Colonial, but we’re in the middle of summer Fridays, so that only meant working until 4 pm Eastern time.
When I went to Tanna to see the volcano, there was a New Zealand couple along on the same flight. They had moved from New Zealand to Chile and bought a dairy farm, which they'd run for around a decade before purchasing a sailboat and taking to the seas.
Vanuatu was an early stop for them. They were there waiting on some parts, and so took the plane to Tanna instead of sailing.
They messaged me today with "We made a video of our Tanna trip! You'll have to find it--can't figure out the link."
If you're curious about the volcano trip I went on, this is a pretty good summary. It's charming.
