A California Online Magazine with Local Focus and Global Appeal
Bang! “What was that?” I said as something hit the canvas roof of our attached tent on the side of our motor home.
It was June in Puerto Vallarta, and the temperature at ten o’clock in the night was still over 95 degrees. We have purchased a television dish and set it up to watch TV while we waited to move on.
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Bang! Crash! Another coconut crashed to the ground in our backyard. We had about thirty coconut palm trees in the backyard of our house in Costa Rica and everyone was heavy with nuts in varying degrees of ripeness. A bird, an iguana, or a raccoon could dislodge one and it would hit the ground, bounce and roll away. We were worried about us and also about our little dog Sherman.
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Ted was never one to spend a lot of money on his clothes. He had a pair of sandals that he had purchased from a bin at Safeway before we left on our worldwide trip. The soles had once had ridges which had worn off years before. They now were flat and slick.
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We entered Turkey at the end of January and began our tour of the country. The first thing we needed to do was buy some groceries. Ahead was a mall that looked like any mall in the world. We found a place to park and entered to find the grocery store. The first thing I noticed was the store windows covered in red Valentine hearts. Another window had men’s jockey shorts covered in red hearts and red Xs, and risqué red panties with black ribbons and little gold hearts hanging from a bow.
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“Where are we?” Ted asked.
“I don’t know.” I answered. We were driving through the large Greek city of Petras, and the road signs were big and legible. However, they were written using Greek letters mixed with English letters. I was completely lost. Finally, he spotted a sign pointing our way out of the city.
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We visited Peru, walked Macho Pichu and the streets of Cusco and Lima, and fought dysentery. We had been traveling for ten years, some time in motorhomes, some time in trains, cars, and planes. Now we were tired and depleted. We flew from Lima to Bogota, on our way to Mexico, where we were to live for the next six years.
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“Let’s go camping.” my husband, Bob, said.
Visions of families around campfires flashed through my mind. Stories of camping families were everywhere. Why should we be different? It is almost un-American to deprive ourselves of the fun of camping. “Sure, I’d love to,” I replied. I would learn to regret those words.
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We researched the best way to visit the famous Bolivian Salt Flats. They start from a little town in Chile, San Pedro de Atacama.
We took a bus to San Pedro and found a small hotel, which made the arrangements. “Just stand by the adobe wall at 6:30 tomorrow morning and they will pick you up for the trip,” the manager at the hotel said.
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Standing in the backyard, holding the hose at 3 a.m., aiming for the targets, I thought back to how it had happened.
I had a lovely vegetable garden in San Diego. I hauled out rocks, built raised beds, applied lots of manure and compost, love, and time. Finally I had a fertile garden. My family ate the freshest, and pesticide-free tomatoes, lettuce, onions, peppers, chard, and asparagus.
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The train from Zambia back to Dar es Salaam passed through another animal reserve. We watched giraffes race along on one side of the car, and on the other, a herd of antelope. The car we were in was filled with tourists, and all of us were crowded at the windows, trying to film the galloping animals. The work strike between the train and the dining room personnel had not yet been settled, but this time we brought enough food to see us through.
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We were in Darjeeling, India for the week between Christmas and New Years day. High up in the mountains where the British used to go to escape the heat in the summer, it was now freezing. The fog was thick and the sun hadn’t peeked through the clouds for a whole week.
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“What do you mean? We have to go home.” I thought I had misunderstood the man behind the desk and the custom office.
We had popped over to Tanzania for the weekend, expecting to return to our apartment in Nairobi on Monday. Now the officials at the border were telling us that we would either have to return home, go to Somalia, or to Zambia before we could return for another six months. The first two choices were out, so we thought, ‘Why not?’ Zambia and the Victoria Falls it is.
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“I broke my leg,” my husband, Ted said as he crawled up the step in the motor home.
“Oh no! How do you know?” I said.
“I heard it snap as I landed on it. I had just stepped into the jungle when my foot slipped out,” he replied.
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“Your transaction cannot be completed.” The ATM machine refused to spit out any money. “Why?” I whined to the clerk at the store.
“You need a local account,” she responded.
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