“Help! Help! Someone please.” I heard the screaming right outside my motel room. I had been napping when I heard the woman scream. I jumped up and ran to the door. Flinging it open, I saw the woman in the next door unit running back and forth. In her arms she held a little girl, about a year old.
Knit, purl, knit, purl. I can do that, I thought to myself. My youngest son needed a sweater and I wanted to expand my skills, so I leafed through the knitting patterns in the book. There was a Norwegian pattern with white snowflakes and reindeer at the top. I had never knitted a pattern with two colors, but I was going to try.
I noticed a bee in the house we were renting in Jaco, Costa Rica. I put it outdoors and gave it no more thought. Later that day, I saw another bee flying around the living room. Those were the first two bees I had ever seen inside the house. True, there wasn’t any glass in the windows, but generally bees don’t find the insides of houses have anything to offer them.
“Do you know what street we’re on?” I asked Ted.
“Haven’t the slightest idea. I can’t see any signs either,” he replied.
We were driving through San Jose, the capital of Costa Rica, on a hunt for a laboratory to x-ray me for a dental problem. The dentist in Jaco had written down the address: 500 meters south from the cathedral.
You would think that crossing a street would be the same in every country. But you would be wrong.
In Amsterdam, we were trying to cross a small street (only one car width) and all going one way, from my right to the left. I had our dog Sherman on a leash as I waited until there was a break in the flow and stepped out. Suddenly, I was flying back, landing on my butt on the sidewalk.
In some ways, dogs are like children. If you have more than one, one will become your favorite. I know parents try not to have favorites and won’t admit it, but it happens, usually to the one that is least able to fend for himself.
While traveling the world for 10 years, my husband and I stayed at low-end budget hotels to keep within our budget. As travelers living on Social Security, we didn’t have money to spend on luxury places. This meant we had a lot of experiences we would have missed if we had stayed only in better hotels. It also meant we met a lot of wonderful people, took local transit, ate from street vendors, and experienced some tummy troubles while traveling. Without these experiences, our 10 years of traveling would not have been as much fun or as educational.
Borders: lines, trucks, vendors, mud, cooking fires, stray dogs, and pieces of tortillas or rolls in the muddy road, men lounging against trucks, women either stirring pots over fires in hubcaps or slapping tortilla dough, children staring out through dirty truck windows, pigs squealing through the slats of wood of one trailer, cows lowing from another, and uniformed guards holding rifles as they walk between the vehicles.
Bridges make crossing rivers, ravines, mountains, and crowded areas possible. We hope the bridge will last until we’re over it, but we’ve all seen pictures where it didn’t and dumped some vehicles down, down, down.
Where to go next? Asia is almost exactly on the other side of the world from California, our home and where all our relatives live. We had thought about what we would do if someone needed us at home, but decided not to start back yet, but rather we would travel to the southern hemisphere.
