Today, we had a long day. We woke up at 2 am Athens time and hopped on a plane to Frankfurt. We went through that airport and then went to another gate and hopped on our second Lufthansa flight of the 34 hour day.

When we arrived in Seattle, we went though immigration and got all of our bags from baggage claim before heading to the Avis place to pick up our car. The car was gray and shaped differently than most sedans. It looked almost sinister, hence its nickname.

We drove for about 2 hours before arriving at Aunt Linda and Uncle Scott’s house. I am typing this post on the same computer that wrote several of the posts at the beginning of this trip. The parental units dropped Eryn and I off to chat, hang around, and do stuff with the relatives while they went south.

Eryn and I played games with Uncle Scott and his guide dog in training. We swept their treehouse clean and helped with dinner and had it ready by the time the parents came back. It turns out that they had gone to Sandy, OR and had bought a used Ford Escape. When they came back, we saw that it was really nice and that they had returned the Mafia Car.

That’s it for now, Folks!

Always alliteration. I seem to sometimes have knack for summarizing some of our day in my titles while making them alliterate. Not illiterate. In any case, we rode on the Aegean airlines today to get from Crete to the mainland. We didn’t even have to wake up very early to do it!!!

When we left the house, we drove for an hour along the northern coast of Crete to Heraklio. From there, we took the Aegean Airlines on their nonstop flight to Athens. When we touched down after only 40 minutes of flight time, we walked across the street to our hotel.

From Eryn and my hotel room, you can see the airport, barely 50 meters away. Tomorrow, we wake up too early to get on a plane to Frankfurt, and then another plane on to Seattle. We will spend our first night in the States in Kelso, WA to spend a night with our relatives, and then on to home!!!

That’s it for now, Folks!

Today was mostly spent packing. Packing is always interesting, because it gives me a reason to reorganize my suitcase, which is nice because it is usually a complete mess. The case was similar to today, where I made my suitcase and its contents be nice, organized, and folded. Maybe not sorted by color, but you get the idea.

When I woke up this morning, I had breakfast with the folks and then played Minecraft on the computer while my parents and sister went out to the doctor’s office for a follow-up appointment to the one a few days ago. When they got back, we worked on packing.

I was finished with my packing so read a mystery novel called the Whispers of the Stones. When I finished with that, I read a book that John Higham, another around-the-world traveler, recommended to me in an email. It is called Ender’s Game. When we finished doing things around the house and swimming, we went out to eat at Taverna Fantastico and ate our last dinner in Crete.

That’s all for now, Folks!

The wind has almost always been present on the southern coast of Crete. Lately, it has been there, and we have been here for a while, so that has been half a dozen times. We went back to the beach near where we had spent the night a few days ago and set up our umbrellas.

Our umbrellas have served us well during our time in Crete. This time however, my parents’ umbrella didn’t stay where they wanted it. It kept being blown inside out while the one that my sister and I were under stayed put. I was glad that we had the one that we had.

While Eryn and I stayed put, my father and mother went over and sat under a big rock. Eryn and I thought about swimming, but the water seemed cool, very cool. We eventually packed everything up and went back home in our car. When we got home, we hung out and swam in our pool before going to dinner at the place with the over-stimulated cats.

That’s all for now, Folks!

My dad is the driver. In Thailand and India, he thankfully didn’t partake in any driving, but in every country since then except for Morocco, Chile, the UAE, and Chile. He has been the only one to drive on this trip except for once my mother drove for 10 minutes on an empty road in Australia.

Today was no different from regular. My father drove the car and everyone else was in their usual rotation of seating assignments. We drove out of town and to the west. We went further than we have ever gone, past the road to the lake, and got to a small town.

We turned off the E75 (the main road on Crete) and went up a hill and down the other side. We went almost to the end of the road before turning back and going towards home the way we came. We then sat around, swam, and read for the rest of the afternoon before going to our landlord’s place down in Rethymno for dinner.

That’s all for now, Folks!

The beaches themselves are never blue, but most of the time, the water is. Today, we went to the beach. We went back to Saint Paul Sandhills and sat there for 2 hours. The beach itself was the same as always, sandy and nice.

This time, however, the beach was cooler than most times, as in it was bearable to on which to walk. We chose a site for our nice umbrellas between some of the pink umbrellas that were already there and sat down. The wind picked up and made whitecaps appear. We sat around and didn’t swim because of the coolness in the air. We eventually packed up and left.

The sun had come out several times throughout our stay at the beach, but it never stayed out long. When we got home, we sat around and read books, watched videos, or played games. Then we had dinner at home of pizza, salad, and green beans before sitting down again to do stuff like right this post.

That’s all for now, Folks!

It was, according to Apple weather, supposed to rain here in Crete today. It did not, though, but it was still overcast the entire time. This morning, my parents and my sister went off to the pharmacy to get some medicine, and I stayed home and played Minecraft, rejoicing in the fact that I was finished with all of my schoolwork for the next couple of months.

When they got back, I vacated the computer so that my father could get back to working on pictures, as always. After a while, he asked Eryn and me to help him thin through a set, but after that, it was back to him again. We sat around inside most of the day.

Late in the afternoon, we deviated from our normal activities and went out to dinner. At first, we had decided to go to a place that the folks had seen when they went to the pharmacy, but after a drive-by, we decided against going. Driving around for a bit, we eventually saw a nice Tabepna (taverna) and decided to go. It was good.

That’s all for now, Folks!

Today, when we woke up, we were (accidental alliteration again, and again) still on the southern shore of the beautiful isle of Crete. We ate breakfast and then Eryn and I played around on the computer that came with the apartment. We then packed everything into our bags and headed out the door.

After leaving the house, we got into our Hyundai car and drove down along the beach. The waves were very large so we decided not to stay at our usual spot as it was covered in water. We continued on to the next beach and set up our umbrellas on a high spot.

After finishing on the beach with our tanning, we walked back to the car and got in it to go back to Rethymno. After only a day of our vacation from our vacation from our vacation, we were back to just our vacation from our vacation. We drove back for an hour and got some bread from the bakery on the way home, along with some chocolate baklava. Then we went home. For dinner we went to Thavma and had delicious food, as always.

That’s all for now, Folks!

We have been to the south shore of Crete several time already. All of the beaches that we have blessed wtih our presence have been on the south shore of the beautiful isle of Crete. We are again at a beach on the southern shore, but this time for the night.

My father got the idea of spending the night on the southern shore a few days ago, and made it happen. We are staying near the Agio Fotini Taverna, and a beach on which we have spent the afternoon several times. The beach is a fairly secluded beach, with a tavern several hundred meters down the coastline.

There are at least 3 different apartment rental units along the shore, and the one in which we are staying has 6 units in it. All of the units have a computer in the deal and that is what I am using to write this post. We spent most of the day today on the beach or in this hotel room. This morning we drove here from Rethymno.

That’s all for now, Folks!

Water is wet, and that is a fact. I know that from countless past swims in pools, waterparks, and lakes. Today I learned that simple fact again when we went to the Acqua Plus water park on the isle of Crete. We went there today because we figured that, since school is out here in Greece and in Europe, that tourists from the mainland of Europe will be flocking to Grecian isles like the one on which we are staying to enjoy their holidays.

The park that we went to today is a large one. Eryn and I went on 15 different runs at least twice each. On the far left facing the hill, were the easiest rides, red, blue, and orange, going from left to right. The best one for me was the red one because it was the fastest. Going over to the right, there was next a blue and white slide that dumped someone into a bowl and they went around and around until splashing down into a 1.75 meter splashdown pool.

Next was the tower area. It had two blue slides and two yellow slides. The blue slides on the outsides were easy and tubular. The one on the left was only for kids ages 8-15 and had no top. The one on the far right had a full tube and was very twisty. The two yellow slides in the center of the tower were steeper and more fun. They all went down into a pool at the bottom. Going back towards the hill, there is a ‘Tsunami.’ It is a large white half pipe where a person in an inner tube goes back and forth across the course before finally drifting out.

Over to the right some more is the set of racing slides. Four orange open-topped slides right next to each other for races. Next over was the Crazy River, which was nice and fun. It consisted of 5 pools, one at the top and one at the bottom, along with 3 throughout. The pools were separated by 50m stretches of slide which one navigated by inner tube. Next over were two ‘Black Holes.’ The one on the left was better because it had more lights, but they were both fun and navigated by inner tubes, and mostly dark.

Last but not least, were the two slides at the far, far right. One of them, the one on the left, was called the Kamikaze. It wasn’t that scary at all and was really fun. The one on the far right was a green tube and went really fast for a bit. It was really, really fun. You finally splashdown in the pool at the bottom after a short ride. Eryn and I did all of those, while my mother only did some.

That’s all for now, Folks!

In case you couldn’t tell by the title, today we went to a beach. We had tried to go to this beach before, but we couldn’t find it. We drove for an hour down to the south coast and the drove on a dusty road to a parking lot. We found a fairly secluded part of the beach, put of the umbrellas, and worked on our tans through the reflection on the water.

As the time went by, I waded out on some stone slabs and saw a snorkeler. Later, we saw a set of kayaks going one way and a single kayak going the other way. We eventually left, packed up our umbrellas and walked to the car. We drove back home the same way on mostly paved roads.

On our way home, we stopped at the Inka supermarket and got cherries, green beans, and strawberries. Yum, yum, yum!

That’s all for now, Folks!

Some people, when they are annoyed at someone, say ‘go jump in a lake!’ If someone asked us to have done it this morning, we wouldn’t have when we went to a lake this afternoon, even though we had a chance. This kind of reminds me of a poem that I had memorized a while back about a fat cat who sits that way every day just to say come out and play to the nice mice in the mouse house in the small hole by the hall floor. It is entitled, ‘I wouldn’t.’

Back to our travels, not the adventures of a fat cat: the lake that we went to today is one of the largest freshwater reserves on the whole island of Crete. Before going to the lake, we didn’t do anything except for sit around our living room staring vacantly at walls. In the afternoon, we went to the lake. In the evening, we went to dinner at Taverna Dionysos for the second time.

The lake was more than I expected. I expected a bitter cold tiny pond with icecaps in the corners and it to be snowing, even on this tropical island. Funny, right? This place was magnificent. It had a clear bottom about 8 feet down all the way around the edge and it had lots of tourists plying around in little paddle boats.  We eventually left after oohing and aahing from a taverna parking lot that, to us, doubled as a viewpoint.

That’s all for now, Folks!

Today we went back to the Frozen Yoghurt place in Rethymno. We woke up this morning and had a leisurely breakfast before hopping in the car (figuratively) and drove down into town. We left around 10:30 and arrived around 11. The first thing that we did was walk down a road towards a fountain.

After a few blocks, we looked at a map and saw that we had passed the fountain a long ways back. We walked back and looked at the fountain, which only had 3 lion’s heads. We looked at it for a while before going to the frozen yoghurt place.

We at lots of frozen yoghurt (over a kilogram) and sat in the colorful beanbag chairs in their sitting area. We ate our frozen yoghurt and then entertained ourselves by watching a large green lizard tied to a chair at a nearby table. It jumped around for a while and then we left.

That’s all for now, Folks!

Tonight we went to Zizi’s. Eryn might have covered the last time that we went there in her post a few days ago, because I know that I didn’t cover it. In any case, we went back there today. Eryn might have mentioned cats, maybe even all 4 of them. Still, though, I will tell my own story of today.

We went back to Zizi’s and ate dinner. The title of my post isn’t exactly about dinner, it is about the entertainment of the dinner. The cats were there again, and we all commented on what my father commented on the last time that we were there; the overstimulated cats.

When I came back to my seat from a break, I saw that the cats weren’t all crowded around or table anymore. My father commented on how they were all everywhere. They were in the trees above the table, on the ground underneath the table, begging scraps from nearby tourists. They were very nice cats, if a bit skittish.

That’s all for now, Folks!

So far we have been on Crete for almost 2 weeks. We have been to several beaches, several towns, several restaurants, and several historical sites. Of them all, we haven’t been to many of the historical sites, but I think that I have been to enough beaches to say my favorite.

Prior to our acquisition of umbrellas, I would definitely say that Saint Paul Sandhills was by far the best. However, after going there again yesterday, I think that it had too big of waves that time to keep it in the top. With our new umbrellas, most of the beaches that we have gone to would stay in the running if we went again.

The one that wouldn’t would probably be a beach near a tavern that had no sand, only rocks and a bit of surf. In all, there were several that would be good, but I think that the ‘Jelly Belly Beach’ would probably turn into my favorite if we had taken our umbrellas there.

That’s all for now, Folks!

Who: Eryn, Jerry, Susan, and me along with our car

What: A beach day on Crete.

When: Today for about 2-3 hours ending at 2 o’clock in the afternoon.

Where: At the Paul Sandhills beach under the shade of our new umbrellas that we bought recently.

Why: We wanted something to do today and decided to go to a beach that we knew was nice. Sadly, it wasn’t as nice as we expected, due to the large waves and the wind.

From that chart, you can probably tell that we went to the Paul Sandhills Beach yet again and that it wasn’t up to expectations due to the uncouth weather and the fact that the wind made it seem way to cold for our swimming uses, even though I did swim around a bit.

That’s all for now, Folks!

Who: Eryn, Jerry, Susan, and me along with our car
What: A beach day on Crete.
When: Today for about 2-3 hours ending at 2 o’clock in the afternoon.
Where: At the Paul Sandhills beach under the shade of our new umbrellas that we bought recently.
Why: We wanted something to do today and decided to go to a beach that we knew was nice. Sadly, it wasn’t as nice as we expected, due to the large waves and the wind.
From that chart, you can probably tell that we went to the Paul Sandhills Beach yet again and that it wasn’t up to expectations due to the uncouth weather and the fact that the wind made it seem way to cold for our swimming uses, even though I did swim around a bit.
That’s all for now, Folks!

Today we went into the town of Rethymno that is just north of where we live. The town has about 40 thousand inhabitants, plus smaller towns scattered around nearby. The city is on the ocean and is alive and bustling with a few locals and…well, tourists. We probably count as tourists, because we went to the main archeological touristic place in Rethymno, but who knows.

The fortezza is on a hill right next to the ocean and overlooks the harbor. It isn’t the biggest fort that I have seen, as some of the ones in India were very large, or at least seemed that way. The fortezza here has everything that one needs to survive for a bit, like powder magazines, gates, armories, and cavaliers.

We walked around the Fortezza before going down to the seashore and looking at a bunch of shops. We walked around for a bit and looked into a frozen yogurt place kind of like Sweetey’s in Springfield. The frozen yoghurt place was really nice and had really cool furniture of multicolor beanbags. Then we got in the car and came back home to swim.

That’s all for now, Folks!

The sun is hot. Far, far away, the sun is burning. It releases heat, light, and that energy goes vast distances at the speed of light, reaching us on earth in about 17 minutes. Some of those rays are blocked by clouds, others hit people directly on.

We were some of those lucky people who got the direct sunlight. We went to a new beach this morning and sat in the sun. At the first beach, we sat on rocks and tossed smaller rocks into the ocean, and at the second beach we sat around more. The second beach had actual sand and we sat on our towels and tanned or burned. For a little bit, my father and I swam in the water.

When we left the beach, we drove home and sat around. Later, we went out to dinner at a pizza joint and had good food. When we finished with that, we went to a small market and bought two beach umbrellas for future use on beaches for shade.

That’s all for now, Folks!

Obviously I only have memories of the monastery that my family and I went to today, because we are no longer there. I think that the main documentation of our time there are the pictures that my father has yet to load onto the computer from the camera.

The monastery is old and has lasted for a long time. It was made around the 5^th century, and restored in the 16^th. The reason that it was restored was because, sometime a while back, the monastery was besieged. Instead of surrendering, the people of the monastery went into the storage of gunpowder and blew themselves sky-high.

When we left the monastery, its chapel, and trees with bullets still imbedded, we drove for a while before heading home. After sitting outside and reading for a while, we went out for dinner and had a good filling meal. When we left, there was still a lot left over. Oh, well.

That’s all for now, Folks!

Today there was wind on the southern edge of Crete. Not so much as the wind a few days ago that come north from Africa, but there was still enough wind to make the waves be big. The beach that we went to was the Saint Paul Sandhills. It is just around the point from Saint Paul beach, but it was still nice.

At first, I went out and swam around in the 3 to 4 foot waves, and then I got out when I got tired. We all tanned for a while before Eryn and I climbed a big rock. Eryn and I then walked around the corner of the rock in the ocean and came back to the parents. After a bit of tanning again, my father and I went out and swam in the big waves.

Some of the waves were bigger than others, and my father and I stayed out farther than where the waves broke. We rode up and down, going from trough to top to trough again. Some waves broke a long ways out and were powerful. My father lost his hat in one of them, but recovered it.

That’s all for now, Folks!

Today we went out around 9 o’clock and drove south. When arriving on the southern shore of Crete, we went to our first beach. Along the way, we went down a paved road, turned around, and then went down a badly kept gravel and rocky road.

At the bottom, we found a nicely surfaced dirt road and drove on it until it joined up with a paved road. We went down to the beach and lay out on the sand and occasionally jumped around in the waves. After about an hour of doing that, we got back in the car and found a paved road going up the hill. It came out 5 feet after the place where we had turned around the car. Oh, well.

After that  beach, we drove for several hours and looked out over lots of beaches. We decided to do the Paul Sandhills beach again tomorrow morning and then walk along the beach. When we got home, my father and I swam in the pool while my sister worked on her math test.

That’s all for now, Folks!

I have (currently) one more math problem for the entire year…too bad. I will finish it before I go to bed, however. In any case, there was wind here today. It started last night about the time when I came in from playing football.

The wind was loud. My family reported that the wind howled through the night. I was too busy sleeping. I woke up this morning and had breakfast with my sleep deprived family. We then looked out the window and couldn’t see the ocean so decided not to go to the beach.

We sat inside and did schoolwork before staying inside some more and doing some things like playing Minecraft. We then went out to get some stuff from a supermarket and then got some bread from the bakery. Later, we went to dinner. After dinner, we learned that the dust came from Africa.

That’s all for now, Folks!

Some people out in my audience might not classify a palace as a castle, but it is close enough for what I wanted, which was alliteration in the title of my post.  Today we went to a castle, or palace, if you prefer it that way.

The palace was the Knossos Palace, under which is situated the labyrinth which used to house the Minotaur. Since you either know or do not care, I will not bore you with the tales of Theseus and the Minotaur; suffice to say that the first one killed the latter. The palace, going back to the original subject, is in ruins, not surprising, considering the fact that it was built around 2000 B.C.

We took the guided tour and walked around, learning about the throne room, how the queen had makeup, about the first toilet, and other interesting factoids. The palace has the oldest mosaic, throne, staircase, theatre and road in Europe. The Minoans were also the oldest civilization in Europe.

After about an hour and a half, the tour ended and we got ourselves some fresh juice. On the way home from the Iraklion area, we stopped by a store and bought their whole supply of juicy red cherries.

That’s all for now, Folks!

This morning, after a bit of breakfast, we left the house and went to beaches. The first beach that we visited was called Saint Paul Sandhills, and there was a fair amount of people in swimwear… or lack thereof. After a bit of sunbathing there, we drove for 3 hours to go 3 kilometers along the coastline. The roads were un-surfaced and bad and sometimes ended up at people’s farms. Oh, well, at least we got to where we wanted.

At this next beach, I swam around and climbed on rocks before it was time to go and we got into the car and started home. It may sound like not much, but there was a lot of driving time. On the way to the first beach, though, we did see lots and lots of grasshoppers hopping around on the road.

After staying at the house for a while, we went out to eat at a Taverna. We had lots of food and came back stuffed with deliciously delicious food. It was all good, homemade, and healthy. Well, most of it, but still, as I might have mentioned, the food was good.

That’s all for now, Folks!

…or lack thereof. Today was interesting. We spent most of it planning what to do on other days. We got up this morning and ate breakfast inside and then sat around, read comics, played Minecraft (only me) read books, and looked at possible beaches to which we might drive.

Around 3 pm, my parents and I went out to swim and swam for about half an hour. Eryn just sat in the poolside shade and read a kindle. When we got back inside, we read for a bit before eating dinner out on the patio. The dinner mainly consisted of rice and beans.

After dinner, Eryn and I went and played with Maria and Bobby. Before long, two boys (ages 6 and 9) came out and played with us too. We played football and then basketball and then tossed balls around. Bobby and I rode on his bike down the hill and around the road. I rode on the axels.

That’s all for now, Folks!

Last night, after I posted yesterday’s post, Eryn and I went outside and played basketball and football. Football, in this case, means what you Americans might call soccer. I call it football. In any case, Eryn and I played with Bobby and Maria, twin 10 year olds. Before we came back in for bed, we promised to play tonight after dinner.

This morning, I went out and shot some hoops with the basketball that they had left behind and eventually, when the kids came up, played with them while Eryn stayed inside. After a day of sitting inside, we went out to eat. By the late time that we got back, the kids weren’t there and the balls were gone.

Oh, well. That is a shame. Still, though, we will have time to play again, I hope. As I was saying earlier, we did nothing very interesting today, though we did swim in the pool, which was blissfully cool in the spring heat.

That’s all for now, Folks!

We, in case you couldn’t tell from the title, have arrived in Crete. After a good night’s sleep aboard the ship last night, we bumped against the dock this morning around 6:30. When we got off, the boat, we found our rental car and got in. After driving for a bit through Heraklion, we found a bakery and bought some pastries and pies.

We then drove for about an hour before arriving at our new house. On the way, Eryn and I looked at a map, which showed a gigantic waterpark. Sadly, it is a ways away from where we are staying, but that is okay. On the way here, we saw a much smaller waterpark, but it didn’t look as fun.

The place where we are staying has a pool. Tonight before dinner, Eryn and I both swam in the pool. It was nice to swim after months of not doing so.

That’s all for now, Folks!

In South Africa, when we were at, I believe, the Haven Hotel, I told you all out there about the changes of a woman’s life. When they are young, they want horses, when they get a bit older, they want a man, and when they get older and older, the want to go on a cruise ship. In other words, the way of a woman’s life can be summed up in one word; horsemanship…horse, man, ship.

Today my mother, who is in the 3^rd stage of that cycle, probably got on to the closest thing to a cruise. The boat in which we are all riding is large. It may not be the largest boat in the harbor, but it is still very large. There are 9 decks in total as far as I can tell, and we are staying on deck 4. Our tickets may say that we are in room 4009, but I can assure you that the plaque on the outside of the door says 4033.

The levels below us are just for cars and trucks, so we are the lowest possible. The main deck from which you can feel the breeze is number 9. As I said earlier, it is a big ship, and it is big enough to even have a pool. Sadly, though, the pool wasn’t open to swimmers, so we spent a dry afternoon and evening. Tonight, after getting on the boat, we ate dinner at one of the onboard restaurants.

That’s all for now, Folks!

In the state capital, Athens, members of the elite Evzones light infantry unit, provide a 24-hour honor guard, with an hourly guard change, at the Presidential Mansion and at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier off Syntagma Square at the foot of the Hellenic Parliament. The Changing the Guard at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in particular has become a tourist attraction, with many people marveling at the guards, who stand motionless for two 20-minute intervals, during their 1 hour shifts.

Or so says Wikipedia. We saw that changing of the Guard today in front of the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. Since you probably learned more than you wanted or needed to about the whereabouts of the Guards, and what they are, so I will go into something that my sister would enjoy…maybe.

The Evzones wore tassels hanging from the back of their hats. Those tassels were then draped over the shoulder and then hung down the front of the tan colored clothing. On the back of the tights, at about knee-height, there was a ball of black cloth fluff hanging on both legs. On top of the shoes, as well, was a puffball.

That’s all for now, Folks!

The Acropolis area is large. In my opinion, it includes the Ancient Agora, the Acropolis, the Zeus Temple, and Hadrian’s arch, not to mention a few other things. Today we explored that area further than yesterday. Yesterday, if you didn’t read my post, we went to the Acropolis and visited the a Parthenon in warm Greek weather.

Today we explored the Ancient Agora, a nearby hill, and peeked inside the Acropolis museum. The Agora was mainly a bunch of ruins that some people thought was very interesting. The most interesting, picture-worthy, and noteworthy thing there in my opinion and a bunch of others’ was the large amount of tortoises.

Actually, the best thing in the Agora was the Temple of Hephaestus, which is the most preserved piece of ancient art in the world. We eventually left the Agora and went up to a hill. We then went and saw the Acropolis museum, to see what we missed. Sadly, photographs were not allowed to be taken for some odd reason.

That’s all for now, Folks!

The sun is hot…I am sweating. Bodies are pressing against me and stinking of sweat as I try to get through the line. I am almost to the front…almost there…

I got there. Eventually, after only a little bit of time, my family and I got to the front of the line and bought our tickets for the Acropolis. For those of you who haven’t, like me, studied archeology or anything like that, then you probably will not know that the Parthenon and the Acropolis are not the same thing, despite ‘common knowledge.’ The Acropolis is a wide field surrounding a plateau.

On that plateau, there are a bunch of ruins, the most important one being the Acropolis. The Acropolis is in ruins, now, of course, and there is a crane sticking out of the middle on ‘restoration.’ I knew that Greeks were smart, but I didn’t expect that.

That’s all for now, Folks!

When we got into the airport,
We saw a bunch of Greek,
We ate a bagful of pastries,
And tried of Greek to speak.

We failed much at this large task,
then got into a cab,
We drove for a while to our flat,
At there we saw now crabs.

Even though Athens was renowned for its navy in the Greek wars against Persia, we cannot see the ocean from our flat. So, because of that, we saw no crabs. We live inland a bit, on a 7 floor building. We are on the sixth. We arrived in Athens after a 3 hour plane ride this morning from Paris, waking up too early.

We are starting to learn the Greek alphabet, which only has 24 characters!

That’s all for now, Folks!

We drove for a long ways today. We drove all the way from Lauterbrunnen to Paris in one day in our gray Ford Focus. We started around 8 this morning and drove north. We first passed through Interlaken and then drove on the northern side of Lake Thun. We then passed through Thun and continued on our way going northwest.

We passed through Bern, the capitol of Switzerland, and then continued on our way. We eventually crossed the border and entered, low and behold, GERMANY! We went for a while on German roads before crossing a canal and arriving in France once again.

We continued on, and while I read some more of J. R. R. Tolkien, my father drove us across France. At around 6 o’clock in the evening and checked into our Hilton hotel near the Orly Airport. We eventually ate dinner in the Eastern terminal and then came back here, to our hotel.

That’s all for now, Folks!

CH stands for the Confoederatio de Helvetica. In English, that means the Confederacy of the Swiss, or the Swiss Confederacy, or something along those lines. In the case of my title above, it does not mean that we went on a large ocean liner filled with people and swimming pools galore, I mean a simple cruise around a lake.

We woke up this morning and left our house around 11:15 and hopped on a ubiquitous train down to Interlaken. In Interlaken, we used our 6-day passes and got onto a boat headed around the Brienz Lake. We stopped several times around the lake before finally getting to Brienz. We stepped out for a bit and took some pictures and bought a chocolate bar and some raspberries before getting back in the boat and heading back towards Interlaken.

After we got back to Eastern Interlaken, we took the train to Grindelwald, and rode up a tramway that was included in our ticket and hadn’t yet been ridden by my family and me. We looked around on the top and stepped into the UNESCO Park before hopping back out again and catching the tram down. We went up to Bort again and Eryn and I played on the rope and wood playground while my parents ate chocolate.

That’s all for now, Folks!

Jungfraujoch… the top of Europe, is the highest railway station in all of Europe. It is at an elevation of 11,332 feet above sea level and is only two hours’ train ride from Lauterbrunnen. Today I will be telling you how close we got and why we were only that close.

We went up towards Klein Scheidegg and changed trains there. We got on the red train going up towards Jungfraujoch and rode upwards until the first stop: Eigergletscher.  Eigergletscher is the highest train station that we can go to with our six-day passes without paying extra.

We shivered a while at Eigergletscher before riding the train back down towards Klein Scheidegg. We caught the train back down towards Lauterbrunnen, and, when we got there, my mother and I scoped out Lauterbrunnen’s recycling capabilities. It wasn’t much… only plastic bottles, glass bottles, and aluminum cans.

That’s all for now, Folks!

Again, like many a day in Cape Town, the three of us (Mother, Eryn, and I) played miniature golf. We played on a course that we had seen yesterday while walking through Grindelwald, hence the title of this particular post.

When we left this morning, we went down into Interlaken and walked around in search of something that we didn’t fully understand. We didn’t find that thing, and so we went back to the train station and rode it up to Grindelwald. In Grindelwald, we walked to the miniature golf place and paid the fee. We went through all 18 holes.

The holes were different from most; one of them was a vertical loop, another was a jump into a net, and another was a horizontal loop. They were all fun, even though I lost. When we finished playing, we found my father again and walked to the train station and took the train back to Lauterbrunnen via Klein Scheidegg.

That’s all for now, Folks!

When we woke up this morning, we didn’t know what we would see or do today. We thought about going up to Klein Scheidegg and playing in the snow, but we never imagined seeing flying diapers. Unlike the Australian Royal Flying Doctor Service, I think that the flying diapers that we saw didn’t want to do anything to help hurt people.

When we left the house, we took the train up to Klein Scheidegg and romped around a bit before heading down to Grimmelwald. From there, we took a tramway up to the ‘First’ Station. While on the way up, we saw a sign that said ‘Restez Assis’… interesting. We walked around on the top for a bit, going to a lake and seeing frogs, before coming back.

On our way back down, we saw some people riding down cables in red harnesses. We thought that that was interesting and noted it. When the people got out, the red ‘diapers’ flew back up the cables, two at a time. They were actually hooked on a rope, but it looked like the harnesses were flying.

That’s all for now, Folks!

That is what we saw today. We went up to the top station and walked around in the snow. However, that wasn’t until late in the afternoon. We first left the house around 11 o’clock, and walked for a while out to a set of waterfalls.

That set of 10 waterfalls is famous for all being inside a cliff face and not being on the outside, like a bunch of the other waterfalls in the valley. We rode up the Ascensor on the inside of the cliff and then climbed around the top 5 waterfalls. We worked our way down to the bottom waterfall and then left.

We eventually got to the train station and rode the train up to Kleine Scheidegg , which is the station at the top. We got out of the train and hiked up a ways through the snow until we found a nice viewpoint. I threw some snowballs at my family, accidently hitting my mother in the neck with one. Sadly, though, I missed most of the time.

That’s all for now, Folks!

In yesterday’s post, I told you that we had driven to Switzerland. Today, we did a bit of exploring around Lauterbrunnen and found some nice things. One of those nice things was snow, and in great quantity. For those of you who have been skiing high up in the Cascades of the Rockies or in any mountain range, you will have seen lots and lots of snow; we didn’t see that much.

After having breakfast and wishing Mother a happy Mother’s day, we set out to the train station and got tickets for 6 days before hopping on a train and going up. We went up until the end of the line at about 2000 meters above sea level, and found snow. Not enough snow to ski on, but still enough to make lots and lots of snowballs. I did. I never hit anybody up at the top, even though I got close.

We rode some more rails back into Lauterbrunnen and then went up the tramway. At the top, we took a train to Murren. There, I found some more snow and threw at least a dozen snowballs at the rest of my family…only a few of them found their mark. We then rode the rails back to the tram and trammed back down to Lauterbrunnen.

That’s all for now, Folks!

Lauterbrunnen means ‘louder fountain.’ We think that that is signifying the 72 waterfalls scattered about the valley of Lauterbrunnen. Lauterbrunnen is in Switzerland, and it we drove into Switzerland and from France today.

After yesterday’s French activities, today we drove. By the way, the answer to yesterday’s riddle is ‘mice.’ In any event, today we drove. We started out around 9 o’clock, and drove until we got to the French border. At a border shop, we bought a highway ticket, so we could go on the highways of Switzerland, and then we were off.

We drove through groves of yellow and green trees and mountains. We went through tunnels and on the lakeside before finally driving into Lauterbrunnen. We then found our new accommodation, which isn’t super luxurious and mansion-like, but it does the job, as we won’t be here too long.

That’s all for now, Folks!

A River Beside,
with mighty rains coming still,
a house with flooding

Roughly describes our time during the flooding. A more peaceful haiku of our time here might go like this,

Sunlight on Flowers,
yellow in mustard fields,
the beauty of France

Shows how beautiful France can be if you come in the right season; just after the rain, and right as the flowers are blooming. Since, however, I am more into riddles and limericks; I bestow this one upon you:

Green Willow trees,
Upon some blue rivers,
Flowing to the seas,
Water it delivers

Rain clouds gather,
In the blue sky above,
Rivers lather,
Releasing the above.

And so on and so forth. I probably could go on for a while, but you get the idea.

That’s all for now, Folks!

PS:

It scurries all ‘round,
all the crumbs to eat,
it makes no sound,
To cats, MEAT!

That is a riddle that I composed today. The answer will be in tomorrows post.

Today was the Day of the Death March. Luckily for us, it did not rain today, so it was an okay walk. We first drove to a lake about 5 kilometers out of town and then parked in a nearby parking lot. We left the car (locked) and walked down to the beach to look at the water.

Seeing as though it wasn’t warm enough, there were not any people in swimsuits, only in sweat suits. We went past them all and crossed the lake on a bridge before starting to circumnavigate the lake. The lake was 12 kilometers all the way around, and we did all of it in 3 hours. Not exactly our best time, but still…

When we finished walking around the lake, we got back in the car and drove to a supermarket. After Eryn and Mother finished doing the necessary shopping for dinner, we drove back to the house. In the house, we did whatever we wanted to do until it was time for dinner. After a dinner of pasta, zucchini, and salad, we retired to the salon and read books.

That’s all for now, Folks!

Today was a rainy day. I mostly sat inside and read the Lord of the Rings trilogy. From time to time, I got up and had a break from my usual repertoire of sitting around, but mostly, it was the same as when it rains here.

I speak like I know the rain here. I may not know the rain, but I sure do know the chocolate bars. We have sampled countless flavors of chocolate bars, from lemon and ginger to pate de almande. We have tried so many flavors that they mostly blend together. Today, for instance, we had almond, the day before yesterday we had the lemon and ginger, and about a week ago we had the pate de almande. It is fun, eating chocolate, and I enjoy it.

Later in the evening, when it was raining a lot, I went against Sarah Cynthia Sylvia Stout’s example (for reference, please see link below) and took the garbage out. I took it all the way to the end of the road, but that wasn’t far, so I stayed somewhat dry without a rain coat.

http://mste.illinois.edu/courses/ci407su01/students/north/kristy/Project/K-Poem-Net.html

That’s all for now, Folks!

Yes. With today’s bike ride, I will have ridden a bike on 5 continents, the two exceptions being Antarctica and Africa. Africa is sadly missing, even though that is the continent on which we spent the most time. Still, though, we biked today, and it was fun.

The Burgundy canal is 150 miles long and has 189 locks for raising and lowering boats up and down the canal. We drove in the car north to Montbard and rented 4 bikes for two hours. We first got onto the bike path that ran along the edge of the canal, and then we rode away.

We rode for about an hour; passing trees, farms, forges, and houses.  When we got to the one hour mark, we turned around on the path and went back, passing over bridges and across roads. We stopped for about 20 minutes to watch a boat be lowered down in the locks.

First the lock woman opened the top gate and let the water inside the lock be brought up to the level of the upper canal. The boat drove into the lock and got shut in with the closing of the top gate. Then, the bottom gate was opened and the boat slowly went down. When it reached the level of the lower canal, the bottom gates were opened and the boat was FREE!

That’s all for now, Folks!

When most people talk about rolling heads, they usual say it in the phrase, ‘heads will roll!’ Today, though, my definition of rolling heads is a bit simpler…and less gory. My definition of rolling heads is when people nod their heads in unison to music. Maybe it is not a perfect description, but it is adequate for my uses.

Today we went out on a walk. The walk went along the river for a ways before cutting across and going along the edge of a cow field until we got onto a road, and then walking along that road back home, making a large loop. When we got home, we had dinner and then sat around reading books and generally being lazy.

We finally left the house again, this time for an organ concert. At the concert, we faced the organ and listened to several songs. At one point, the people in the row two rows in front all started to nod their heads in unison to the same beat. We finally left after an hour and a half of organ playing.

That’s all for now, Folks!

Today was Sunday, and almost everything was closed. I say ‘almost’ because the main thing that was open was the farmer’s market on the pedestrian walkway. When I went up to my father and attempted my Spanish with ‘moi carne,’ as in, much meat, and then my father went on about ‘oinki carne’ and ‘clucki carne.’

After I finished being annoyed with my father, we went back around to our house the long way. It was mother’s idea, and when we got home, she wanted to walk along the river on our bank, which we had never done before. We kept going for only a little ways before coming along to a barricade. We did not go past the barricade, instead, we walked back home.

Later, we had dinner in our house of pizza, zucchini, and other such things. I think that today was a good day.

That’s all for now, Folks!

Today was spent in relative ease. We spent most of the morning inside, telling the TV news reporters that there was nothing to see, and generally just sitting around. I personally read Lord of the Rings, so I had a good time.

Eventually, we left on a quest to see the Chateau de Bussey, an old manor up in the hills. We left our house and its receding floodwaters in our car and drove to the museum. On the way from the car to the Museum entrance, my father and I both petted and scratched a nice looking dog that had looked endearingly at us over the fence with his paws stuck through the holes.

Eventually, after we finished walking through the museum and going through a maze that wasn’t amazing because there wasn’t any way to turn wrong. We then left and went back home, and when we got home I made us all some Pecan and Chocolate brownies. They were very, very good.

That’s all for now, Folks!

I was thinking about titling my post ‘Wet-‘ something or other, but when I came up with the title that you see, I knew that it would be best. You have heard from previous posts recently that it is very wet this spring in France, and that was proved today a lot.

When I woke up, I walked to the boulangerie and bought the day’s supply of 1 baguette, 4 pain au Chocolat and 1 pain cereal. It was raining the whole time, and when I got back, I sat in the living room and won our monopoly game that has been sitting there for some time on the floor. I finished with 11 hotels and all the properties, un-mortgaged, of course.

Just so you know, our house is arranged on three different levels. The bottom one is directly on the river, and is Eryn and my bedroom. It is also only accessible by an outside staircase. Then there is the kitchen/dining room and salon area, where we spend most of our time, and finally there is my parents’ room on the very top with an inside access stairway.

We started seeing the water level rise a bit earlier, and Eryn and I had put all of our stuff up on our beds. When a police officer came and advised us to clear out, we took our bedding and luggage upstairs and waited. Eventually, the property caretakers came along and put the beds and everything in a storeroom above the oncoming onslaught of water, as it was flooding the room.

Safely on the top floor now, we have most of our stuff in the car in anticipation of the air raid siren to go off to signal for us to evacuate, but we hope that that doesn’t happen.

That’s all for now, Folks!

Today was spent on a quest for Mustard.  Dijon mustard is famous for its strong flavor, and we experienced some of that while trying to find some good varieties. We finally found some in a streetside shop.

Inside the shop, there was shelf after shelf of mustard bottles. There were lots of different flavors, from raspberry to blackcurrant to wine. We got a bottle for ourselves and have not yet delved into it. I think that we will, though, in the morning.

We found the mustard on our day’s excursion to Dijon. It is about an hour from our base by driving, and we walked around and saw several churches and gardens during our walking, and also ate sandwiches and pain au chocolat.

That’s all for now, Folks!

Today was mostly spent by me immersed in my schoolbooks so that I could get the Lord of the Rings trilogy on my kindle. My father had promised me that if I got two weeks ahead I could buy them, and this is the closest that I have ever gotten. I hope that I will make it.

When I wasn’t buried in a book with my pencil in hand, we were going outside on walks. Whenever the sun was shining, which wasn’t very often, we would go out. The first time was to go to the church, and we achieved that. The church even had nets below the ceiling to keep the pigeon poop from falling on the heads of worshipers.

The last walk out went to dinner, and we went to the place that we had been to twice. I talked several times about our family and Eryn, but no one at the table thought that it was funny, especially Eryn.

That’s all for now, Folks!

Today we started another game of monopoly. So far, none of the three of us have gone bankrupt, but I feel that one bankruptcy is just around the corner.  I have one full monopoly (yellow) Eryn has the first set past go, and Mother has the railroads.

We only played for an hour, and in that hour, not much has happened, so we can’t see a clear winner. The future is foggy, and as the Artful Dodger might say, the fog is sometimes very helpful. See Terry Pratchett’s Dodger for full details.

In any case, we played monopoly today, and hope to continue tomorrow and maybe see a winner by tomorrow, and have that winner have won by the next day.

That’s all for now, Folks!

The modest bell tower in the title that my mother mentioned while ‘guiding’ us through a UNESCO World Heritage site seemed more of budget cut to me than being modest. The reason for that is that the bell tower was barely a tower; it barely came up above the ridgeline of the roof from which it was protruding.

We saw all of that when we were walking through an abbey this morning. The abbey is named L’Abbeye de la Fontanay, which I think means the abbey of the Fountains, which is an apt name indeed because the use of the natural supply of water to keep fish and to turn a waterwheel which in turn made a hammer hammer a block of wood to help the monks craft iron.

We first went and saw the Church, which was a traditional church with barrel arches and not much fluff. It used to have enameled tile flooring, but now the floor is only dirt. Inside the church, near the alter, are two tombstones that depict a knight and his wife, both of which are not carved ultra-well. We then walked up to the monks dormitory, which also had a dirt floor, and learned that the monks lived in close quarters, with only a small screen separating them from their comrades.

We then went outside and saw the boiler room and other rooms. We also saw two gardens with fountains in them, hence the name of the whole Abbey. We finished off by looking through the museum part, which pictured broken sculptures, video, and a shop.

That’s all for now, Folks!

Looking back upon it now, Paris seemed like a very novel place. As we have had several rainy days here, I have decided to go back in time in my mind and posts to tell my many readers what I learned about Paris and what I thought about it, besides the fact that the Eiffel Tower is really tall.

One issue that I think some people have is the expense. Paris is expensive, but I am wondering if the occupants and laborers of the city get paid respectively to the city prices, as in, they get enough to match the prices. I think that, though, one of the reasons that we were surprised by the prices was our time in countries that had currencies that were worth less, and so we were used to have a dinner be in the 100s range of that currency. In Paris, it is 40, and twice or three times as much.

Another thing that I learned about Paris was how nice the people were. They seem nicer out in the countryside, but even in the crowded city, people on the street greeted a passerby with a cheerful ‘bonjour,’ even if they had never seen the person before.

In all, I think that Paris is a great place to live, even if it is a bit expensive; the people are nice and there are enough ways to get around, aka Metro, Bus, and taxis.

That’s all for now, Folks!

Today we lounged around inside and relaxed, as there wasn’t much that we could do with the rain pouring down outside and the river bursting its banks. And so we spent much of our time sitting around inside, playing Scrabble and working on the puzzle, which is almost finished.

Later in the day, we went out under our four umbrellas of four colors and got some ice cream. I got a good selection of two scoops of chocolate, one scoop of vanilla, covered in chocolate with a deluge of whipped cream on the top. It was very good.

I am thinking that most of us are hoping that the rain stops sometime, as the height of the waterline of the river is getting higher and higher, not to mention the fact that we have been stuck inside for two days, not counting my daily runs to a boulangerie.

That’s all for now, Folks!

Today, when we woke up, it was precipitating slightly, but by the time that I left to get some items from the boulangerie, it had stopped. However, once I got back, it started again, and it hasn’t finished since. The rain came down in torrential amounts, washing the streets of debris and making the river flow higher than usual.

However, since it is spring in France, the rain is expected, so we have anticipated it with some dread. Once we get to Switzerland, though, the rain will be frozen and in the form of snow, so we will be thoroughly chilled.

Today, we mostly stayed inside, with the notable exception of going out to dinner, which we did at two restaurants. The first one was not to our culinary tastes, so we went to the place that we had gone to on our first night in Semur.

That’s all for now, Folks!

I think that I mentioned yesterday how we saw, in a museum, a decapitated statue head that had interesting hair. Well, odd life, but we saw the real thing today. The real thing, actually is still a statue, but it is downsized some. It is in the traditional form of Gaelic looks, as in, what people thought they looked like during the reign of Napoleon III.

The form of a Gael back then looked like what we called a Viking. They wore horned helmets. That is about where the similarity ends. The statue of the defeated king in fighting with JC has long, shoulder length, unkempt hair, a face like Napoleon III, a long mustache, and a pearl necklace. All of which have been proved to be falsehoods about the Gaels.

We saw the statue near Alesia, an ancient town of ruins in eastern France, where we are now. Alesia was place number 5 on the list of our things to do. The first was a town, in which we walked, the second one was the source of the Seine river. We then went to several more towns before arriving at Alesia.

That’s all for now, Folks!

Today we went out into the village where we are now residing to explore. Eventually, we came upon the Museum and went in. It was free, which was nice, and the giant head near the door had a neat hairdo. We walked down the aisle and looked at statues.

Most of the statues had what looked like warts coming out of odd parts, and we deduced that that was for more effectual 3D imaging. When we finished looking at statues, we arrived in a room in which Eryn and I tried out a bow and felt the weight of a heavy shield.

We continued with the museum until we got to the top level, which had paintings and several other statues. When we finished, we walked back to our nice house along the riverbank.

That’s all for now, Folks!

We are now in the Burgundy region of France. Ah, the countryside at last. After a week of hectic activity in Paris, we now will wind down and warm up in this ‘quaint’ little village. We drove most of the morning today and finally arrived in the late afternoon. We got into our place and unpacked a bit before going to dinner.

At dinner, my mother and I decided to share a several dishes, and when I asked her about pizza, ‘Do you want a margarita?’ she said ,’No, we are getting tap water,’ and I replied, ‘Mother, I was talking about pizzas!’ She agreed and dinner was good.

Our house is right on the river, and from it we can see the ramparts of the city. I think it is a good location, and so did the marketers.

That’s all for now, Folks!

If you remember, in Cusco we had a sewer problem. Today, my family and I descended down into the sewers of Paris and experienced the same smell, though more acute. We were walking around in the underground sewer museum.

The sewer museum was built a long time ago and it still works today, though there have been a few additions. The original sewer system was designed and directed by a man of the name of Eugene Belgrand. He designed contraptions to keep the solid waste from clogging up the tunnels, including using the pressure of the water to push the sand and other buildup out of the way.

After we finished that, we took the metro to a shopping mall underneath the Louvre and looked around. I spent most of my time in the Apple store looking at iPads, iPods, and iPhones. When we finished with that, we left and went to spend some time in the Luxembourg Gardens before looking at the Pantheon.

That’s all for now, Folks!

…Notre Dame. Again. Notre Dame means ‘My Lady’ in French, and today we climbed up the towers today. We didn’t see a hunchback, but he could have been hiding. Or he could also be dead because the ‘Hunchback of Notre Dame’ was written in the 19^th century.  Notre Dame is, this year, celebrating its 850^th anniversary, so there are lots of building and bleachers out in front with which to admire the view.

As we ascended, we went around and around a central column, like the stairs on the cathedral on the hill overlooking the City of Paris. We kept on going up and finally arrived on a balcony that connects the north and south towers. We took pictures for a while before climbing the stairs up to the top of the south tower. From there, we walked around, took pictures, and then waited to be let down the stairs.

We eventually got out into sunlight again, and had walked about statues before returning home, back to our apartment on the banks of the Seine River.

That’s all for now, Folks!

Notre Dame,
Is the claim to Fame,
Of Paris,
On the River Seine

Today we,
Up and went to see,
The church,
With big pink trees

Later then,
We went there again,
To hear,
One play an organ

In other un-rhyming words, today we went to Notre Dame. We went on a tour in the afternoon, and in the evening came back to hear a man play an organ.

That’s all for now, Folks!

Today we went to the Louvre. The Louvre is a timeless art museum located on the banks of the Seine River in Paris. In it are well known pieces of art, including the Venus de Milo and the Mona Lisa. As I already said, we went there today.

We met our guide under a small arc in the front courtyard of the museum. We went under I. M. Pei’s glass pyramid and started our tour. This wasn’t one of those ‘here are the facts about so-and-so, made in year such-and-such, and made by the great artist ______.’ This was a Louvre tour ‘dedicated’ to young teenagers, presenting a quest at the beginning of the tour, with smaller sub-quests.

Our guide, Laura, was something like Gandalf the Gray, a guide that knew its stuff. She took us through galleries upon galleries of art. She showed us the development of movement in statues, from one small step made by a bronze statue of Apollo (11). Then she showed us a statue of a man about to be flayed alive hanging by his hands, with all of his muscles stretched. He had picked up an enchanted lyre and had won in a contest in Apollo, and Apollo sentenced him to death by being flayed.

We continued, on, eventually seeing painting that showed stories, not just sculptures, and saw many, including Leonidas I at the Battle for Thermopylae. In any case, it was a fun tour that I think we all enjoyed.

That’s all for now, Folks!

My sister is different. She may be absolutely brilliant in math and science, but when it comes to photography equipment, she is sometimes absolutely clueless. A prime example of that is when my father is taking a picture of Eryn and I in front of some interesting scenery (the Eiffel Tower) and he told us to look at the lens, my sister asked, ‘What is the lens???’ I answered her question, and she said, ‘Oh yes…I knew that!’

Today we went to the Arc de Triomphe, which is on the western end of the most expensive street in the world; Champs Elysses. We climbed up the spiral staircase on one side, took some pictures from the top, and climbed down the other side. On the other end of the 1.9 kilometers of Champs Elysses, we popped out of the metro system at the Plaza de Concorde. On the south end of the plaza is La Seine, the river that runs through the central of Paris.

We then went to the Eiffel Tower. After waiting in line for a while, we bought our tickets and worked our way through another line for the elevator halfway up. After we got out of the legs and about halfway up, we switched elevators to one that had four skylights and rode up. When we got off, we were on the top of the Eiffel Tower. We oohed and aahed for a while before taking the straight elevator down. My father and I took the stairs down one of the legs, while my sister and mother took the elevator. They arrived at the bottom before us.

About that time, my father started taking more pictures and Eryn asked the aforementioned question.

That’s all for now, Folks!

In this case, unlike in the case of Arthur and his company of brave knights trying to vanquish the rabbit in Monty Python’s Holy Grail, the ‘holy hand grenade was actually a fruit. It might not have been holy, but it fit in one’s hand and was called a grenade.

Today, we woke up early in Fez and hopped into the van with Majeed and all of our stuff. We went to the Fez airport, checked in, went through passport control and security, and waited in the departure lounge for our plane to arrive, empty, and then start to fill with passengers for the flight to Paris, with us being four of those passengers.

Eventually, we saw the orange tail of the EasyJet aircraft destined to take us to Paris without harm. We eventually arrived in Paris after several hours of flight time, some of it occupied by a screaming toddler in the seat right in front of us. When we got to the CDG airport on the northwestern corner of Paris, we hopped on the metro and rode it to the stop nearest our flat. Excusez-moi, apartments.

Later, when we went shopping for some things, mainly stores and Orange shops, we found a supermarket, and, in the fruit and veggie section, there was a fruit that said ‘Grenade’ from ‘Uran.’ We think that that means that those are grenades from Iran, but you can never be too sure.

The Holy Fruit Grenade of Uran

That’s all for now, Folks!

Tonight, when we were sitting on the rooftop balcony of the Clock Café, my father and I looked out towards the west, towards the sunset, and saw an interesting hill and cloud formation. There was a purple-ish hill in the front, and then a purple-ish cloud in the background, with light orange and white wisps of cloud vapor in between.

That created the look of a large volcano caldera, with the wisps of vapor steaming up from the lava. My father commented on how it was tilted towards us, but when my sister and mother looked, they couldn’t see anything that resembled a round mountain a couple of minutes later.

Today, we mostly stayed home, though my mother and I went to her last PT. When we got back, my sister was the only one home and my father and Alami were at the PO trying to ship our packages home. When my father got back, he told the story of all the complications that were needed to be gone through in order to ship a package to the US. We then sat around some more before I went outside and played with my friends one last time, said goodbye, and then went with my family to dinner at the Clock Café.

That’s all for now, Folks!

Tonight, when we were walking home from dinner, there were sections of the walking-only road that were very congested, and others that had very few people on them comparatively. I say comparatively because when my mother and I go to her PT early in the morning, there is almost no-one out there, save a few early-risers.

Anyway, the people came in pockets, and they came every 10 meters or so. For those of you using the imperial system, that is about 32’ 9.703125” using www.metric-conversions.org. So, in other words, the pockets of people were about 30 feet apart.

Today we went almost nowhere. My father and I went out and got doughnuts late in the day, and then I played soccer out in the alleyway with some of my friends. Then, I went inside and got ready to go, did some stuff on my kindle, and then we left to Tommy’s, and on the way home, we encountered the pockets of people.

That’s all for now, Folks!

Today we went to the Café Clock for breakfast. Three of us had the Ricotta Pancakes while my mother had scrambled eggs. We then immediately left and didn’t stop at home so that we could get to a fort on a nearby hill as soon as possible.

We first weaved our way through crowd filled streets, crossed a major one, and then started up a dirt path. We went up, headed towards the fort that was at the top of our field of vision. We kept going up until the trail ended except for a small ledge that extended about a foot before dropping off down onto some partially burned garbage some 50 feet below.

We walked along the edge, clambered up an easy slope, hopped over a small fence, and were right down the road from where we wanted to be. We walked up the road, into the place, and then found out that it was 8 minutes too late to go in, as it closed at 1200 hrs, and it was 1208 hrs. Too bad. We looked around for a while on top before descending a different way.

That’s all for now, Folks!

That is my mother’s suggested title for today’s post, and Eryn says that she (Mother) is getting illiterate. I don’t know. I just work here. Today we, excuse me, I went on three trips out of our house in Fez. The ferst one was one going to Mother’s physical torture this morning, the second one was out on a shopping expedition to get food and sweets, and the last and final one was to dinner at Le 44.

For the PT, my mother and I went, and while she hissed, I did schoolwork. Then, I went with my mother to Marjane to get some chocolate bars for deserts before hopping in a third taxi and heading back to the ancient Medina, where we stay.

For food, we went out and bought sweets, bread, eggs, oranges, and several other things that are around the house after going down to see if the doughnut place was closed. Sadly, it was, so we had to make do with sweets.

For dinner, we went to Le 44 and sat up on the roof terrace, at the farthest away possible table from the kitchen. My father says that the waitron used to be overweight, but with tourists that sit up on the roof, he has gotten skinnier.

That’s all for now, Folks!

For those of you who don’t know what rock management is, it is when a manager asks an employee to get them a rock, and is never satisfied with the rock that is brought to him. That is about what happened today to my father and I at the Post Maroc office today.

When we arrived, we pressed the button for a slip and it rolled out. When our number was buzzed, it stayed on for a split second before being replaced by another number held by someone else. The security guard then made us his personal project and started looking at boxes for us. The first one was too small, and the second one was too big. We finally decided on the first one. And we hope it will work.

The rest of the day was mostly filled with schoolwork, naps, car shopping, laundry, and other such things that happen on such a down day.

That’s all for now, Folks!

This morning, my mother and sister went to PT, while my father and I stayed home and did techy stuff. When the women in my family came back, we sat around for a little bit before heading out on a shopping expedition. We left our house and walked down the street, turned right, then right, and then walked down the hill on the way to some stores that we had been to before.

First, we went to a scarf shop that Eryn had been to previously, and my mother bought a scarf, after bargaining of course. After we left that specific shop, we walked down the street to the brass shop that we had gone to on our second day in Fez. We looked around in both outlets of the shop, and then compared different models. If this sounds like car dealings, I have, by the way, been looking at cars as well today.

We looked at the three different sizes, outlawed one, and continued on the last two. We decided to only get the small one, and we bought it for roughly the correct price. My father then went to an ATM to extract the amount of money needed for the purchase, and we were on our way. On our way home, we bought delicious doughnuts. Yum.

That’s all for now, Folks!

We got up early this morning and walked bare-footed across tile flooring on the roof of the hotel and watched the sun rise above the horizon. Then we went back to sleep. We did things that did or did not need to be done, and then, in the middle of the afternoon, we saddled up on our camels and rode away. We rode for about an hour on the dunes of the Sahara desert before arriving at a camp. My father and I climbed up a nearby dune, and my sister and mother followed soon thereafter, and we watched the sunset from the summit.

We then went down and ate dinner, and after dinner, Amy, Autumn, and Andrew went with Eryn and I to the top of the dune again and we sat up there while everyone else sat by the fire and listened to drumming. The three As were Americans from Italy on holiday, but soon they will move to Oahu on Hawaii. Later, we went down, got into our tent, got into our beds, and went to sleep.

The Next Day…

We woke up this morning and rode camels away after watching the sunrise from the large dune near camp. We rode back to the hotel and cleaned up to eat. Then, Eryn and I hung out with Amy, Autumn, and Andrew (ages 11, 16, and 14, respectively) and the pregnant cat. We then left in the car with Majeed.

Later, when we stopped to look over the edge, men with horses trying to get us to ride apparated on site, bring with them horses, and laying siege to us in our car. When we got back to the car, another man had appeared with his portable store, so there was a shop outside our window. That reminded us of yesterday, when we were at a lake, and out of nowhere,  8 guys appeared with wares, trying to sell us stuff.

That’s all for now, Folks!

Our driver today at first called the monkeys ‘crazy monkeys,’ but by the time that we left the place with the monkeys, he was calling them chimpanzees, which also didn’t sound right. Barbary Macaques is the correct name of the monkey, and it is also the type found on the rocks in Gibraltar where we had gone in 2004. This time, however, we saw them on the side of the road while going through the Middle Atlas Mountains while driving south from Fez to the Sahara, where we are now.

We got in the car with Majeed early this morning after breakfast, and then got into his car and drove away. After driving for a while, we got out at a monkey stop and walked around for a bit, but didn’t see any monkeys. I amused myself by punching out the ice in little bird baths by some picnic tables, before we were in the car again. Majeed had just turned the key in the ignition before he saw monkeys coming towards us. We stayed for a while and fed crackers to the monkeys and watched them nibble on them. After a while, the crowds started to arrive and a monkey hopped onto our car, and we stayed for a bit longer before the monkey got off and we left.

A bit later, we looked out the window, and right outside was a snow bank. We got out to see the snow and take pictures, and I threw a snowball. Later, we stopped to look at the beautiful scenery, with storks in the foreground and snowy mountains in the background, with a green wet field in the front.

That’s all for now, Folks!

Today we went to gardens. Well, one of them was officially a garden while the other one was debatable, as it was also a park. The first one had an attached museum that we also saw. In the museum there were old clothes, old clothes, and old weapons and instruments.

The first garden was small and not very well maintained. There were overgrow hedges and bees by the dozen. However, the fruit trees had heavy branches, laden with ripe fruit. The oranges were ripe and everything was in bloom.

The second garden was much better cared for; the fountains were running, the hedges were trimmed, and the flowers were all in rows. Sounds a lot like French garden. Not surprising considering that Morocco was a French colony, so at least it isn’t too much of a surprise. We will be able to enjoy gardens like that in the rain in France. FUN!*

That’s all for now, Folks!

*Not

On other days when there has been PT, my mother has hissed her way through the time, in an effort not to scream, cry, or in any other way embarrass herself overly. Today, however, her PT was relatively devoid of any hissing, though there was the occasional squeak from her physical therapist.

I went with my mother to her PT this morning after waking up early and having a not-warm-enough shower. After eating a small breakfast, my mother and I went out. On our way home, we swung by Marjane and got some groceries, ice cream, and cake.

When we got back, we let ourselves into the house and went around doing regular tasks, and when the rest of the family got home, we sat around some more. Eventually, I went out and played with Mohammed and his friends with a ball, while the rest of my family went on a shopping expedition. Later, we went to dinner at Le 44 and then came home and ate a chocolate bar.

That’s all for now, Folks!

My father read in a guide book that the people in Morocco believe that male sheep meat is more tender than female sheep meat. To prove that their meat is take from rams, the owners of butcheries have ram legs that have one testicle hanging off the end, to prove its sex.

We have seen several of those male sheep legs hanging from the knee from a rail above the counter at a butcher’s, and had always wondered what they were. Know we know, and it is an interesting tidbit of information that might be useful to pass on in stories, as it might be funny, interesting, or gross to different people.

Another thing that is sometimes displayed in meat shops is the decapitated head of a camel, complete with wet and bloody hair on the lowest bit and something throaty hanging down by a small amount of tissue. Not exactly my favorite sight.

That’s all for now, Folks!

Today was mostly spent indispensable while we listened to the pitter-patter of rain drops in great multitude upon the roof of our Dar in Fez. As in India, this is a hot country and the rain always seems to find us. I still have a sneaking suspicion that we take rain wherever we go, something interesting in light of the episode of ‘I Dream of Jeanne, My Master the Rainmaker,’ that we watched this evening.

In any case, in between droplets, my mother and father went out for PT, while Eryn and I stayed home. Eventually, after the parents had come home, we all went to the Clock Café. Eryn and Mother shared a chocolate pudding souffle, while I had an orange and almond cake. Both were good, and when we finished, my sister and mother signed up for cooking classes tomorrow morning.

In the end, we left the Café, and my mother and I went out to get supplies for dinner. When we got home, we did some stuff for a while before getting ready for supper. After a supper of soup, bread, and strawberries, my parents and I ate the remainder of some ice cream that we had, and then we worked upstairs on finishing up what left we had to do to go to bed, including writing this post.

That’s all for now, Folks!

Today we went back to the leather souk that we had gone to with our guide for our walking tour a few days back, and this time we seriously looked at the products. My father and a looked at ‘poofs’ which are like small beanbags, while my mother and sister looked at slippers and shoes. Eventually, when we were about to leave, I convinced my family to at least look at the leather jackets, even if we weren’t going to buy any.

When we got to the jacket floor, I looked through some styles and picked the one that I like the most; a black leather jacket with 5 pockets, 4 on the outside and a small one on the inside. I poked around at some other things while my mother tried on a red jacket, decided it wasn’t what she wanted, and then found one that she wanted that was also red. We didn’t feel like buying, but we just wanted to know the prices, and it was a lot.

The guy at the counter convinced my father to state a price, and they agreed to it and now our family’s wardrobe now has the accoutrements of two new leather jackets from Fez, Morocco.

That’s all for now, Folks!

Salad: The traditional Moroccan salad, we think, is chopped up tomato, cucumber, and onion with some sort of sauce. However, we have had other types that are more about six different tapas that are shared around the table.

Bread: The traditional bread here is buns 1 inch tall and about 6-10 inches wide. The bread comes in different varieties; with grains on the top, white bread, and whole wheat, but in essence, it is mostly the same thing.

Fruits and Veggies: Mostly the same as home, though they do like to give eggplant a bit of a smoky taste when cooked.

Meals: The meals are good and cooked, and the curries are delicious. There are many varieties of tapas and falafel like things that someone can try.

Escargot: I decided to leave a section entirely for snails because there are stalls along with the street with vats full of live snails, crawling over each other in the futile quest of getting out and saving themselves.

That’s all for now, Folks!

Some of us woke up early today, some of us didn’t. I think that Eryn and I qualify to be in the last category, and my parents qualify to be in the first. Well, we woke up this morning and got out of bed, walked downstairs and put some food into our stomachs, and then continued with our tasks of getting ready to go. At 8 o’clock, we were at the post office and got into a car and drove away. And so ended our time in Fes.

We arrived at Meknes an hour later, and the first thing that we did was look at the city from a panoramic location. We then got into the car and drove to a granary and stable that housed 12000 horses at once. That is a lot of poop. They then used the poop to fertilize the ground around Meknes. We then went to a mausoleum, and then walked into the old medina of Meknes. In the medina, we went to a bakery and watched people for a while, while eating pastries, before going to the car and leaving. And so ended our time in Meknes.

We then drove in the car with our driver to Moulay-Idriss, the oldest city in Morocco. There, we walked up to a panoramic location before walking down to see a mosque, where our driver prayed. When he finished, we walked out, but on the way I bought a hunk of nougat. It was good and sugary when we ate it. And so ended our time in Moulay-Idriss.

We then drove to Volubilis, where there are some ancient Roman ruins. There was a poor section and a wealthy section, and on the floors of both parts’ dining rooms, there were beautiful mosaics of Roman gods and heroes. We took a guide and toured around; walking through and around the Triumphal Arch and standing on the edge of a baptistery. When we finally finished two hours later, we had seen and heard a lot. And so ended our time in Volubilis.

That’s all for now, Folks!

Football, in this case, is what Americans call soccer. I went outside our traditional house today and played football with some guys. There were also sometimes girls, but they squealed, and that was about all they did.

At the beginning, there was a guy that was older and had a California University Class of 1989 shirt on, but after a bit of playing he left. About the time that he left, another guy about my age came and played on my team that had been subtracted from with the loss of the guy that I first mentioned. This new guy played or a while, and then he went to his house and get two baby chickens and we played with them for a while.

When this friend went to return the chicks, we found a kid a bit younger than me passed out in a dark alleyway. We notified the restaurant next door and they attempted to revive him as we left to go play, with the accoutrement of another guy a bit older than me. We played with him for a while before my second friend left, and then the newest guy named Mohammad and I, along with a few others, worked on our goalie skills. Then I went inside and the group dissipated.

That’s all for now, Folks!

Well, for the first time in all of Morocco, I think, we saw a dog. As mentioned in the previous posts, the Islamic religion forbids the use of dogs as pets, and that is the main reason for getting feral dogs. Today we saw the first one, and it was sleeping.

I have mentioned to my father that in Morocco, it seems as though cats and dogs have switched places; cats are active and ubiquitous, while dogs are practically nonexistent, and when seen, are seen sleeping in the sun, as we saw today. We saw that dog while walking on a tour with Eryn as our guide. We saw a synagogue door, a palace gate, a courtyard, a market, and more gates as required by the tour.

We are starting to be orientated on our walkings around Fez, and hope to get better as time goes by.

That’s all for now, Folks!

Maybe full cloud. And raining. Today was a fairly miserable day, going on a tour and finding everything as far as the eye can see wet. Luckily, it cleared up eventually, but we still had gotten wet, even through our rain coats.

We went to the Medersa near our place again, and then went down through the markets to a wood museum, but didn’t go inside, because we were on a tight schedule. We kept going for a while before finally arriving at the tannery. We looked down from a lookout tower and saw vat upon vat of multi-colored liquid, from yellow to brown. We also so a white-ish liquid that is made of limestone and water to get the wool and fur off the skins.

The whole tannery smelled different because the tanners use pigeon droppings for their tanning, as it is not toxic, as other things are. The finished product doesn’t smell at all. Which is good. We did not get anything at the tannery, but who knows, we might yet.

That included some of our walking tour today with a guide.

That’s all for now, Folks!

That is what we hoped for today, but, contrary to our wishes, the rain came and came, pouring in through cracks in the ceiling and getting everything that shouldn’t get damp, damp. At least none of the electronics got wet.

However, with the rain, cold poured in, emanating off of the rain droplets and surrounding us in our quandaries and work. In the end, we just put coats on to fight the chill and settled down, huddling in the bottom of our chairs and conserving heat. The rain I think has ended now, but, luckily, we were always inside whenever there was an exceptionally bad deluge.

That is what happened today, hindering our progress in exploring the wondrous Ancient Medina of Fez. Maybe if it had been sunny, we could have seen some more coppersmiths pound away at their work.

That’s all for now, Folks!

A Medersa is a school of Islamic learning. In Christianity, it might be called seminary. In Pakistan, they are called Madrasas. There are several in the Ancient Medina of Fez, and today we went to one of them. The following are memories that I have of the Medersa.

The ceramics are detailed, colorful, and geometrical. They adorn the lower walls all around the courtyard, adding color and life to the school. There are also cedar partitions that surround most of the open spaces, rendering it hard to see through, but allowing light to shine through. There was also a lot of stucco that has been carved so that, if the arches fell on someone, it would be a most painful death, being pierced dozens of times and having the weight of a roof on top of you.

Another interesting thing about Fez is that it is cat heaven. Though they may not get the pick of fish from fish vendors on the street, they generally rule the city, causing no mischief and generally having the right of way.

That’s all for now, Folks!

..do as the Fezians (?) do. I am not sure what that means exactly. Maybe it means knowing where you are in the middle of the mazes in the Ancient Medina. Maybe it means sitting behind desks trying to sell things, or maybe it means living in Fes.

At the moment we have only achieved the last one, and for that I am happy. It is fun getting lost on the confusing little streets. I guess that is why there are maps. It is also fun to talk. Everyone wants to know where you are from, what your name is, and if you would like to buy anything.  Knowing the streets is something that takes time and patience. We might have time, but mostly, we stay on the main street going down the center of the medina, housing the market.

Today we walked down the main street. After walking for a ways, we came upon the central market. We looked around at men banging copper pots with hammers and stuff like that before going on a tour at a brass lantern factory. The copper got taped with a pattern, and then a practiced artisan would cut the pattern with a coping saw. Then another man would use hammer and a pointed bit to add texture, before someone else put all the pieces together and formed some sort of lamp.

That’s all for now, Folks!

Our casa in Fez is large and different. We arrived at the casa after a 2 hour train ride from Casablanca. When we arrived, we got into the car of a guy that had held a sign with my father’s name on it before arriving in the old Medina from 789, AD. We then piled our stuff into the cart of a man and went off. He took us down the wrong street, but eventually got it correct and took us to our place. The old Medina has a maze of twisty little passages, like the streets and alleyways in Venice.

The casa is tall. When walking in the unassuming door, you see a bench with three round cloth pillows on it and a doorway off to the right. You walk through that doorway and see curtains off to the left and push your way through them and arrive in a courtyard with lit-up lanterns in the corners, and stairs off to the left. To the right, there is a doorway; to the left is a kitchen and to the right is a bathroom. Also in the courtyard is a table with 6 chairs. To the end is a living room area, and to the right from the courtyard is a small sitting area.

Up the stairs, there is a left and a right fork. To the left are my sister’s room and a balcony with a half-bath to the end. To the right of that fork is my parents’ room with en-suite full bath. Up the stairs again, you get to another fork. To the left is my room of two twin beds and to the right is a door. Sliding open the deadbolts and taking the key, one would walk out onto the roof and have the choice of sliding open the glass roof for the courtyard, and a kitchen is straight ahead, using the key to get through the padlock. Going up a set of metal chairs, you arrive on a small balcony that has no furnishings of any kind and only foot-high railing.

That’s all for now, Folks!

Alliteration, how interesting is that? It is not very interesting because a lot of people can do alliteration with any letter. Although ‘x’ would be hard to do, all of that making my title sentence not very memorable in the end. However, we did go to a mosque today and we did hear about a myth and it was morning and it might be memorable.

The mosque was the Mosque Hassan II that was built only twenty years ago. It is a mosque that extends out over the sea, and some guidebooks might say that there is even a glass floor that you can look through to the sea. There isn’t. As it turns out, the builders used regular building techniques to build the columns in the ocean, and then had to fix their mistake, as salt water erodes things a whole lot faster than air. In the end, though, it has turned into a fairly spectacular building.

The pillars on the inside are concrete coated in marble, along with the floor. The glass chandeliers were imported from Venice, and there is local stucco to make the elaborate arches. The women’s prayer balconies above are made of locally cut cedar trees. Underneath, there is an ablutions room where men wash in fountains, there is another somewhere else for women.

Another myth that might be mentioned is my father’s Chicken Myth from the golden arches, our first time eating there. Ever.

That’s all for now, Folks!

Leaving in the morning,

On an okay plane,

Leave Peru with Mourning,

Silently to stay sane.

In Panama get out,

Get through the TSA,

To Newark without doubt,

In the states, you don’t say?

Climbing back through a gate,

And sitting in our seats,

Hoping we won’t be late,

More than the eye will meet.

In Lisbon out we climb,

From a gate that is prime, (41)

Now on a tiny plane,

Flying over the sea,

Going away from Spain,

Now in Morocco, you see?

That’s all for now, Folks!

Alliteration, as always, answers few questions. I imagine interesting things would happen if someone used alliteration to answer annoying askings, as an animal attacks.  Lima is a big city, crossing the city can cause crashes and collisions concerning careening cars. To stop alliteration, I will tell people more about the city of our residence for the next 5 hours.

The city is on the western side of the continent of South America, on the Pacific coast, and is on a peninsula jutting out into the sea. It is a large commercial and industrial city that has fishing boats and cargo boats cruising around its harbor, looking for anchorage so they can unload their cargo of fish or freight containers. Lima is accessible by all means of transportation except for rocket ships, maybe. We arrived and are leaving via the rather large and ostentatious airport.

That’s all for now, Folks!

For those of you who are not up-to-snuff on your Greek mythology, Hermes is the god of travel, the road, merchants, messengers, and other sorts of things. Today we saw a bank truck that was probably full of money in the middle of Lima with the name of Hermes. I pointed out to my family that, ironically, Hermes is also the god of thieves.

Interesting.

Last night, after some time and debating, we decided to move to a different place to stay the night because of the brown stuff on the floor of our rooms and so went a couple of yards down the street to a more salubrious hotel. We spent the night and morning there, finally leaving at 11 o’clock AM.

We went to the airport in a taxi, checked in, went through security, and then got on our flight at about 12:30. We flew for about an hour and a half before landing in Lima. We got into a van and drove to our hotel, where we stepped into a VERY salubrious room. We later went to the store to get some things for dinner before coming back to the room, and on the way seeing the bank truck.

That’s all for now, Folks!

My father has just told me not to complain about how he didn’t get me a hostel with a pool because of all of the cesspool in the main lobby. The reason for that is because of all of the rain that fell down tonight and burst the sewage system, showering the rooms with, er, things that we thought we had left behind.

We woke up this morning and had a regular morning, going to the Meeting Place Café for breakfast. When we finished with our game of Scrabble and our waffles, we left and went back to the hostel. We did stuff that we usually do on a down day; schoolwork, reading, deleting pictures, and other things. We finished up with that late in the day and went down for ice cream and pastries, including apple pie, before coming back and deleting more pictures.

We finally went to dinner and ate soup and pasta, along with a virgin strawberry daiquiri and water before coming back to our hostel. My sister was in the bathroom when suddenly I heard her hammering at the door screaming,

“HELP!!!”

I opened the door and she rushed out, quickly being pursued by the mad liquids and solids of the toilet system. The toilets bubbled, the showers squirted, and the floor drains regurgitated all that ever went in. In other words, it turned into a wet, brown mess that everyone wanted to avoid. Sadly for the hostel, the only person there was the receptionist, and his place was soon buried in a foot of water from everywhere else, ruining the computer.

Now, a bunch of people in the hall are hurriedly taking bucketsful of the stuff out to the street and letting it run away. We are wondering how we will go to the bathroom and how to sleep.

That’s all for now, Folks!

…let the caiman do it. That was Reve’s favorite line to say during our time in the Amazon basin. He said that a lot whenever we were getting out of the boat and it was muddy outside, which was most of the time. Our cook during the trip had the name of Palta, or avocado in English, which was sometimes lengthened to Paltacha. I am not sure if that is a sobriquet or something, but it is what everyone called him.

The boat driver had the same name as his son that accompanied us on our trip. The captain got up before us and went to bed before us, but never got to sleep in the boat. I think that the sun was only along for the ride, and he usually sat behind the tarp-covered luggage on the floor. The boat helper’s name was Jonathan and he was the one that tied up the boat, pushed it from the docks, and did other such things.

Those were the main staff and helpers of the trip in the Amazon, and today we left. We started this morning in the boat and went 3 hours downriver. From there, we got into two different taxis and drove to another river, crossed that, and arrived again at the SuperVan. We drove for hours and hours in that before arriving in Cusco again.

That’s all for now, Folks!

I look out from my nest of branches in the Amazonian rain forest and understand for the umpteenth time why it is called the rain forest; it rains a lot. I am the Red-and-Green Macaw that everyone wants to see during their time in the Amazon. I am waiting for the rain to clear up-if it will-so that I can go out over the water and a hide to eat some clay.

The reason that we as macaws need to eat clay is that 80% of our diet is made up of unripe fruit nuts, and the trees have developed a grudge against us and have put poisons in the fruit so that we should die from eating, but we don’t because we eat clay always before we eat the unripe fruit.

Finally, after all of my cogitations, it is starting to clear up. The rain clouds are moving away and I feel like eating clay. When I get to the clay lick, I am one of the first ones there, so I sit on top of a bamboo stick and wait for something to happen. Eventually, it does, and all of us fly back and forth to see if anything is hiding. When we think it is safe, I am the first one down at the lick, eating. As soon as my two friends start to join me, a vulture flies over and we all fly away. Oh, well, at least I got some clay.

That’s all for now, Folks!

…almost. The reason for that was because he might have fallen into a stream that was across the path that we were taking through the rain forest near his father’s house on our way to a clay lick that attracts tapirs and other animals to drink, snort, and bathe in the mineral rich soil. All of that, however, was after a day full of boating and other activities that mainly focused around the water.

We had an early start this morning to be ready to leave in the boat at five from the place where we had been staying for two nights. We all clambered into the blue, aluminum boat and drove downriver towards Hummingbird Lodge and the Madre de Dios river, where we had started  a couple of days prior. At first we looked for jaguars, scanning the banks with alert eyes for the flash of a twitching tail or the sight of a jaguar sun-bathing on a log. However, when it started to rain, we pulled out the tarp and hid underneath it and went to sleep, stopping at the ranger station on the way out of the park.

We finally got out of the Rio Manu, and went along the Madre de Dios River until we arrived at the town of Boca Manu, where we got some more gasoline for the boat that was almost out of the fuel. We then stopped again at Hummingbird Lodge and ate our lunch before continuing on down the river, into the rain. When we got to Reve’s father’s house, we got all of our stuff out from underneath that tarp in the back and climbed up the stairs to our quarters. Eventually, we left on the walk that included the parcel in the first paragraph before arriving at the hide for the tapir lick and sleeping for a while before walking back to the lodge to eat and sleep.

That’s all for now, Folks!

When one gets stuck on the edge of a muddy banked river and has a machete, what one could do was hack away at the mud for a while until there was a nice set of stairs going up the bank so that the crew and passengers could do what they wanted to do. What we wanted to do in that situation was go on a walk to see an oxbow lake from a tour and to look at a large tree.

Once we could walk up the bank, we walked on a trail to the edge of the lake and then up, up, up the tower to the top and looked out over the lake or a while, seeing birds of various varieties before heading off down again. We stopped again at a lookout over the lake and admired the beauty of the Amazonian rain forest before going on to see the big tree.

When we finished with all of that, we drove back for half-an-hour in the boat to the camp, but the dining room lights wouldn’t work. Reve yelled at the resident natives for a while and they came back with a battery that worked just fine, and it all worked out.

That’s all for now, Folks!

Getting right up close to a caiman is interesting, especially in a small wooden boat. The caiman might bolt, attack, or just sit there, waiting for something to happen. The last option was what happened to us today as we sat in a lake after dark on a catamaran.

The catamaran was something like two canoes tied together with planks laid across the top, and in the back ends, the captain and his helper paddled with large paddles while we looked for caimans and otters. We eventually saw a family of 8 Giant River Otters from our boat before docking and relaxing for a while.  That family of otters is the same one that appears in Planet Earth, that our guide, Reve, helped film. After that, we piled back onto the boat in the dark and looked for caimans.

One caiman that we saw let us come right up to us, and we got some good pictures. When we finished with all of that, we got out of the catamaran and walked along the path back to the river and got into the boat to drive back to the new camp, where we will be staying for another night before heading down river.

That’s all for now, Folks!

There are only 100 days left on this trip, and we are doing some interesting things to spend those days. We are in the Amazon basin still, and have ridden a boat for most of the day. The title of today’s post is saying how tarantulas do not ever need vacation, as they live in interesting places like Columbia, Costa Rica, and most importantly: Peru.

We took a night walk tonight to use up some time, and saw 4 tarantulas of two different varieties. Averaged out, that would be two of each kind, but we saw three of one kind and one of another. The path that we were on wound its way around in the jungle, leaning around giant trees and weaving in between green thickets.

Our first tarantula was an all-black one that Reve teased out of its hole with a blade of grass. We saw another one of those before turning back, and on the way, we saw an orange and black one that never stayed long out of its hole. The final one was the child of the first one, and once we saw that, we went back to the lodge for another early start.

That’s all for now, Folks!

With rain, there comes mud. Not with the rain exactly, but the mud forms into its squelchy little self when rain falls from moisture in the air and wets the ground, causing it to be slippery, slimy, and sucking. On dirt roads, the rain and mud can cause mudslides, making the roads nearly or really impassable.

We rode on a road that was the former, not the latter, and were able to make it to where we are now to stay for the night. The place where we are now staying is called Bambu Lodge, built by a carpenter and his sons out of bamboo for guests that are on their way to the river. We are in the Amazon Basin, but have yet to get to any such thing as a port or dock protruding into the river that we have been following down a valley.

We left early this morning at about 5 am in a van made for at least 15 people that only had 8. At the first stop, we dropped off the uncle of our guide, Reve, at his house and then drove on. We drove past and walked though some pre-Incan burial grounds before eating breakfast on the road. We then continued on to the eastern equivalent of Ollantaytambo, before heading up to the pass. We stopped at the gate of Manu National Park but did not go in. From there we went downhill to where we are now, at about 730 meters above sea level. Tomorrow we finally get into the boat and on to the river.

That’s all for now, Folks!

Today was the day were we finally packed up everything into our backpacks and our small duffel bag to take down to the Amazon tomorrow morning. But first, there was an important thing to do before we left: go to the chocolate museum and make our own chocolate.

At the chocolate museum, we learned about the different stages of chocolate from bean to bar. There are three main different types of bean. Two are grown in South America, one in Africa. In Africa, the main producers are the Ivory Coast and Ghana, where there are a lot of beans grown. In South America, there is one type that is grown naturally and another that is a hybrid between the two grown in South America and Africa.

A tree usually has two seasons of harvest, one from October to March and another from June to August. The one from October to March is the larger one, averaging for about 100 pods per fully grown tree. In the other harvest season, there are only about 50 pods per tree.

The tree starts out in a shade covered nursery, growing about 8 inches tall before it is sold to tree farmers. The tree farmer should plant the tree under shade, preferably plantain or banana trees, and fertilize the plant. The plant will start producing fruit in about 2 or 3 years, but will reach full maturity at about 5 or 6 years of age. The plant needs to be tended to every week so that some fungi will not inhabit it and kill it off before it can produce any food.

After the beans get harvested, they are cut open and the white seeds are carried away to where they are dried in the sun and roasted. They then get but into bags and shipped away. The beans are eventually shelled and crushed, before getting mixed with milk powder and sugar to make the chocolate. Eventually, the chocolate gets heated at 40 degrees Celsius and then mixed and molded to form chocolate bars, which take 10 beans to make a 100g bar .

We then went to the factory to make ourselves some chocolate. We first roasted some beans in a clay pot before grinding them into a paste with mortar and pestle. We then used that paste to make several different kinds of drinks; an early Spanish hot chocolate and an early Mayan hot chocolate. The Mayan drink was a little bit spicy, but my favorite was definitely the Spanish hot chocolate.

We also learned that when the Spanish first got to the New World, they thought that the Mayan’s drink was too spicy and bitter. But when the Spanish took some of the beans home, the discovered how delectable the chocolate really is and made the first hot chocolate as we know it. They also kept the chocolate a secret from the rest of the Old World for 100 years!

Then the best part began: we got some warmed chocolate from a bowl and used a variety of molds and mix-ins to obtain chocolate. I got a mold for six chocolate bars and made each one different. There was one that had Brazil nuts, peanuts, and almonds ground up and there was another with peanut butter M&Ms with raisins. When we finished, we went back home for an hour to let the chocolate set. When we got it and tasted it, it was really, really good.

That’s all for now, Folks!

Pronounced ‘sexy woman,’ Saqsaywaman is an Incan fortress overlooking the Incan city of Cusco. We did not go into the fortress because of the admission cost, but we did climb up and see the white Christ that is lit up at night and overlooks the city.

It was a long ways up, and looking down over the city, we realized that the city ended very abruptly. There is the main square, a small suburb, and then…nothing. The rolling fields of green, separated from time to time with sprinklings of dark green trees, went on forever over and beside the hills that formed Cusco’s geographic location.

There were not very many terraces, so the hills were smoother, but some still grew quinoa and corn to supply the city and the farmers with food. We were impressed by how serene it was, even though, when we turned around, there were the sounds of the city; the car horns, the church bells, and the din of people speaking to each other.

We finally went down the hill with alacrity; being happy that we were not climbing up the flights and flights of stairs that wound their winding way higher and higher up the hill. We were lucky to have climbed up the hill in a valley, but were climbing down the hill on the middle of the face. Later, we had dinner at another organic restaurant, and my ravioli was scrumptious!

That’s all for now, Folks!

That is what we are hoping to see on our 7-day tour in the Amazon basin starting on Monday. We went to the office of the tour company this morning to be briefed on our physical fitness and to sign that we will not hold the company accountable if we get injured or killed.

Another thing that we did during our interview was try on rubber boots. When we finished with all of that, we went to the Plaza de Armas. From there, we went up the hill to our hostel and I worked on schoolwork for a long, long time before leaving for dinner.

We had a delicious dinner, and the staff was really nice and gave us a complimentary dessert, which was good. After that, we went to our hostel and bedded down for the night.

That’s all for now, Folks!

Breaking rocks is hard. We as modern day humans are still are astonished by how the Incas could put rocks together seamlessly without mortar to survive for hundreds of years. One of the methods of cutting the rock was pounding it with harder rocks, while another was drilling holes, putting in sticks, and then soaking the wood to make it expand and crack the rock.

The moved the rocks from the quarry 50 km away using wooden rollers to go across a river and up the hill. Using alpaca and straw ropes, the dragged the rocks up the ramps. There is a giant rock that is along the roadside, and giant tractors could not even budge it from its resting place in the ground.

We learned all of that from our guide for our half day tour today in Ollantaytambo (Olly).  When we left, we drove to Cusco and there we checked into our bed and bakery before going out for dinner in town. When we finished with that, we went to a bank and extracted some money from the depths of an ATM before heading back to our B&B.

That’s all for now, Folks!

Some people call the fountain in the ancient city of Machu Picchu the ‘Fountain of Eternal Life,’ but now, it is dirty and there is not enough oxygen in the water, so it is now the fountain of eternal diarrhea. We did not partake of that water, though we did see it a lot.

We left Aguas Calientes this morning and rode the bus up to Machu Picchu. At Machu Picchu, we immediately went across the city to the trailhead for Waynapicchu.  We walked up and down and then up some more, gripping the steel cables tightly when needed, before finally arriving at the top and seeing the view of Machu Picchu and the surrounding land.

By the time that we got back down to the bottom, it was time to go on our tour around the city. We went with 12 other people and learned about how the Incas worshiped the Spaniards when they arrived because they thought that they were gods, and then got slaughtered by the thousands. When the tour was finished, we went off by ourselves and looked at some viscachas and at how closely knit the rocks were.

When we were finished with all of that, we got back in the bus and rode back to AC, were we went to the train station to go back to Olly, where we are now.

That’s all for now, Folks!

We are in the town that is at the end of the Sacred Valley closest to Machu Picchu. Tomorrow is the day that we will go up to the ruined Inca town and see why they lived there and see some of their buildings. We are also going to go up Wayna Picchu, which is a large hill at one end of Machu Picchu and is the hill that has the Temple of the Sun on the top.

We are going to go to everything tomorrow, and we are now in Aguas Calientes. We met our guide tonight and talked to him about what we are going to do in the morning. We take the bus around 6:30 to the ruins and then go up Wayna Picchu between 7 and 8 am.

That’s all for now, Folks!

The real name of the town that we are now in is really long and complicated, but at least it starts with an ‘o.’ It is out between Cusco and Macchu Picchu, and so we are staying the night in preparation to leave in the morning for Aguas Calientes. Aguas Calientes is on the bottom of the bus route up to the Macchu Picchu area where we will go in two days’ time.

Ollie is a town in the Sacred Valley that has hills with ruins surrounding it. Today, we climbed up one of the hills to see some granaries and to look out over our town. It looks like an ear of corn with the roofs that have exactly the same pattern of reddish-brown shingles that overlap each other. The town is very small and we have walked across it several times.

When we left the hill with granaries, we went over to the bottom of the hill with the Temple of the Sun but didn’t go up because of the admission costs. At the bottom, we saw a really small kitten on some steps and declined to pay some men in traditional dress for their services of standing in front of our camera lens. Later, after we went to dinner, we got some giant brownies and came back to our lodge for the night.

That’s all for now, Folks!

Today we said good-bye to our kind and generous benefactor, the man of the apartment, the Dr. Gooey.  He left this evening with his heavy suitcases and backpack on a taxi towards the airport. This is the last that we will see of him for at least 3½ months. We spent our last day with him going around town and into it to buy some things that were needed and not.

When we woke up this morning, we all ate breakfast and then my mother, Dr. Gooey, and I went into town and went to some local shops where my mother bought something for the table and I bought a drawing pad. We then went back to the apartment, but on the way went to a supermarket and mall to see some ice cream.

When we got back to the apartment, we puttered around for a little while before going to the ice cream shop that my mother and I had scouted out. When we finished with that, we went over to the shops and bought nothing before leaving the mall for real. When we left, we went back to the apartment, and later we went to a restaurant for dinner before saying goodbye to Uncle Richard.

That’s all for now, Folks!

Though we did not meet a guy named Tom tonight, we did tell some riddles to one another in the aspiration to get the other’s brain cells to work harder. I was the main one asking questions, though several times in during dinner my father did mention the ‘What is in my pocketses?’ riddle. We did not, however, ever ask that riddle because it was not actually a riddle, just a simple guessing game where some creatures in dark mines know not of what you are speaking.
We did all of that in an Italian restaurant that was overlooking a busy street and on top of a casino. Before that, we had done several things. We left the apartment this morning and went out to a monestary where there was a large, nice, low-light library with a lot of sheepskin bound books. After we had looked around that, we went downstairs and looked at the stuffed birds and such from the Amazon and saw a lot of clay jars. When we finished, we left the monestary and the workers locked the door behind us. From there, we went over to the market where there was everything from chicken feet to flowers to linens. There was also meat of every variety. We then left and did a tour of the cathedral. Among other things, the large bell in the left tower was 5 tons in weight and it took two men to swing the clapper.
After that, we went to Creppisimo, a crepe shop, and ate some crepes. Eventually, we left, and went back to the apartment for some naps. We did some things and took naps before deciding to go out and go to the Italian restaurant. When we finished eating, we thought about riddles for some time before heading back to the flat to do this post and to go to bed.
That’s all for now, Folks!

After being woken up this morning in the ‘maid’s quarters,’ I ate a hurried breakfast and got into a truck with Uncle Richard, my father, and Victor, a seismologist for one of the colleges here in Arequipa. We drove out of town on a road that used to be the main throughway between Arequipa and Cusco. It is now mainly unused, so there was no traffic on our way up through the thousands of meters. We went up and up and finally arrived at the sensor housing that we were going to decommission.

The sensor was a metallic cylinder that weighed about 45 pounds and had an internal pendulum to measure quakes from different areas. It is expensive and fits into a plastic box about twice its size for shipping purposes. We officially decommissioned the sensor as soon as we had moved it from its specified corner where it had been resting for 5 years, pointing north. After we had packed everything away and taped the wires together, we rode back down the mountain.

When we got back to the flat, we messed around for a little bit before we all went with Victor to a mill, where there were llamas, and to a storage facility for the CalTech equipment. In the basement, there were several seismographs that were working while we talked. Victor turned up the amplifier for the sensor and made it look like there had been an earthquake on one of the seismographs for our amusement and we looked at the various sensors in the three rooms. When we were finished, we went back to the flat.

That’s all for now, Folks!

With a yellow poncho and only one arm sticking out of the arm hole, my mother commented that she was the ‘big bird.’ We are in Arequipa now and are staying at my Uncle Richard’s apartment in downtown. We woke up this morning early in Arica and drove to the Arica international Airport. When we got there, the airport was empty. After waiting and waiting for a while.

There was finally someone at the check-in counter and we checked in and were the first people waiting upstairs for the police counter to open. We waited for a while upstairs before the police counter opened and we were able to go through that and security before waiting for a while more for the airplane to get ready.

After 35 minutes of flight time, we popped down into Arequipa and found my Uncle Richard waiting for us and reading a novel. When we got out into the parking lot, we found a taxi and all 5 of us got into a space meant for only 4 people. When we finished up with that and all of the grunting of going up 4 flights of stairs to my uncle’s flat, where we spread our stuff out for a while. When we decided to leave, we went out to get keys, Claro, and look into some museums.

We first got some keys duplicated by a streetside vendor before walking down the street for a ways and getting to a convent. We learned about how the nuns were not allowed to leave the walls and only their slaves could go out. We also learned how they were NEVER EVER allowed to see men, and even the priest for Mass was always behind a curtain.

When we finished up with that, we found that outside, it was raining, so on a street corner, we bought a poncho and an umbrella and went to a grocery store to buy some necessities. After going through the necessary steps to get a taxi back to the flat, we rode back and the new keys worked. For the rest of the evening, we have eaten See’s Candy, talked, and done things on some of the various electronics scattered around the room.

That’s all for now, Folks!

That is what my father called the restaurant that we went to for lunch/dinner today to try to get to bed earlier. It didn’t work. It is 9:35 PM according to my watch and I am still writing this. The reason for that is because a man name Jack from Washington (state) played the banjo while I played one of the guitars that the hostel provides.

For the sake of my readers, I will start at the beginning of our day: As we are in Arica now, we decided to sleep in to get a little bit more rest. After waking up and getting some food for breakfast in the café downstairs, we stayed inside well past 11:30 playing scrabble, labeling pictures, and reading.

When we finally left the house, we went to the restaurant mentioned above in the first paragraph and ate some vege-meat, rice, and vegetables. When we left, we decided not to buy some of the scrumptious looking pastries behind the counter at the door, even though we were still feeling a bit esurient.

After getting back home, we decided to go back to the market street and get some helado to eat. Eryn and Father shared a bowl of three flavors, while my mother and I shared another. When we finished, we went back home and I played the guitar with Jack on his banjo.

That’s all for now, Folks!

Or ‘More Foxes’

The time for us to leave was rapidly approaching when we had finished packing everything into bags into the dining room and left off in our gray car up the mountainside to where we saw the foxes yesterday. When we got up to the top, we went over to where we had seen a lot of viscachas yesterday, and low and behold, there was a fox, or zorro in Spanish.

It had what we think was a dead mouse in its mouth and it went up to a little cave and the mouse disappeared. When the fox got back out of the cave and walked along the rock-strewn hillside towards where we saw the three yesterday. When it got out of our line of site, we went across the small bridge and across the road.

Across the road, we saw some more viscachas and that was about it. After my father took several pictures of a mouse, we went back across the road to our and down the hill back to Putre to get out stuff and go down to sea-level and Arica. When we got to the bottom, we went to the place where we had stayed last time and lounged around before going to dinner.

That’s all for now, Folks!

Parinacota. The name is the name of a town, volcano, and province. All of which are in Chile. The town has an old church. But the guy that runs the place went on strike when a new cell phone tower went up a ways away from the church yard. The bell tower has to working bells and two without clappers. The stairs up on the inside were very short. Even I had to duck down to get up to the top and look out over the small town.

Parinacota was on our tour with Barbara today. We went out in our Nissan X-Trail up the shortcut, and almost got hit when a red mining truck came screaming around the corner. Luckily, both the driver and my father had good reflexes and while he went off the road on our side, we went over to the other side before continuing on. After driving for a while, we got to a hot spring and got out to walk for a while. On the way to the springs, we saw several viscachas sitting on rocks alongside the path. After feeling the water, we went across a bridge, and on the other side, Eryn spotted some movement. I identified them as foxes through Barbara’s scope and with my eyes, and it turned out to be 3 cubs playing around on the opposite hill.

After watching the foxes disappear and seeing some vicunas run around a bit, we went out to the other side of the rod and saw some viscachas again and then, in the distance, some rheas. After doing the necessary ‘oohing’ and ‘aahing,’ we went back to the car and drove away towards Parinacota. After Parinacota, we went back to Putre.

That’s all for now, Folks!

The sign said 5200 m.s.n.m., which I think means 5200 meters above sea level, but according to our GPS, the highest that we went today was 4795 meters above sea level. However, I am not just writing this post to argue about what signs and electronics say, I am writing this post so that anyone out there who wants to learn more about our trip can do it without leaving the comfort of their office chairs.

We drove up the hill this morning from Putre, without guides or other people, just us. We went up on the dirt road and saw some Andean Deer eating from farmers’ terraces, but those were about the only animals that we saw for that time. After that, we turned left off of the main highway and onto a road that went up towards some snowy peaks and pinnacles, up north.

After getting up to the summit with the aforementioned sign, we started down the other side, figuratively speaking, as we were still way below the top of the mountain, barely above the desert-like plains down below us. After driving for a while, we got to a large stream, , where everybody got out to see what it was like. Eryn and I crawled through the culvert. It was fun, and we were really glad that we had been wearing hiking boots to go through it, not shoes that were for running and were made of foam.

While we drove from town to town and back on that road, we saw a lot of vicunas on either side of the road. At the end, we turned around and went back the way we came, seeing-again- lots of vicunas alongside the car. When we got back to Putre, we did some work and then ate dinner.

That’s all for now,  Folks!

In the morning waking up,
showering and eating food,
Drinking juice from a cup,
trying to be in a good mood.

We drive to our guide’s house,
pick her up and drive down, the road with my mom’s spouse.
Away, away, from town.

Seeing deer in numbers,
driving down the road,
trying not to slumber,
seeing fields that were sowed.

Seeing an animal,
right alongside the car
a rodent and mammal,
off of the roadside tar.

Going past the police,
Stopping for some llamas,
Seeing Andean Geese,
Alpacas and their mamas

Looking at flamingoes,
and coots of different kinds,
our time draws to a close,
a rhea we might find.

Reveling in no rain,
coming home and reading,
Wetness would be a pain,
But not at all would eating.

That’s all for now, Folks!

Just like yesterday, Eryn and I slept through Eryn’s watch alarm, and my mother was late in trying to get us up. After taking showers, my sister and I joined our parents in the café, and just as we were getting our food, Barbara, an Alaskan and our tour guide, arrived. We chatted with her for a while about what animals we wanted to see, and then she left and we got in the car for a drive.

We went for a while on the rode that we took into town yesterday, and then, at a truck stop, took a road south. We were in the ‘zonas de curvas’ and there were a lot of very pretty flowers. From pink to blue to red, there were lots and lots of different colors that brightened up the day, unlike what would happen if there was only the usual arrangement of dead grass and cactus.

Eventually, we got to the town that we had been driving to; Belen. In Belen, we got out of the car and walked around some of the 4 churches in the central plaza. At the top of a flight of stairs, my sister and I climbed up an open bell tower and looked out over the town that was even smaller than Putre. When we got down, we all hopped into the car and started the drive back home, passing by a hydroelectric plant.

When we got back, Eryn and I worked on schoolwork while my father worked on labeling pictures. When we got bored of that, we took a walk through the rain towards town. In town, we got some fruits for tomorrow’s tour before going over to a restaurant. After the restaurant, we went to a shop, where I bought an alpaca wool scarf while Eryn and Father both bought some ice cream.

That’s all for now, Folks!

A red headed condor flies up, up, up. Being the bird of Chile, condors are protected, and Joyjon the condor knows that, but he still remembers the days when people hunted his kind and vultures for feathers. It is nearing evening, and the bird flies over the coastal town of Arica, which sees the least precipitation of all the cities in the world.

Joyjon is a well-traveled bird, having gone from the southern tip of the new world up to Peru to see his relatives and Machu Picchu. He has been to most cities, from Valparaiso to San Pedro de Atacama to Santiago. Now, he was back in his home city, Arica, where he was born on the large rock that overlooks the city.

He flies over Arica, seeing people with blue and black suitcases board onto a taxi and drive off. Joyjon decides to follow them, and follows the four people to number 602 on Chocabuco. It is a rental car place, but there is no one there, and they go off to the Arica Surf House, check in, and go out to eat dinner. When they come back, they act all festive, like it is someone’s birthday, and Joyjon goes to sleep in a park.

When Joyjon wakes up, he decides that he wants to follow the family of four from the Arica Surf house, and sees the man go back to the rental car place and get the car, and when he gets back, the others come with 30 liters of water and some food.  Then they get into the car and drive east towards Putre.

Up on the high Andes, the air is thin, but it felt good for Joyjon to be up there after so long of being around sea level, stealing some fish off of fishing boats when he became really desperate. He tracks the silver SUV up the mountains and to the little town of Putre, where they get out and check in to a lodge. Joyjon decides to see if the hunting is any good, and heads off for the night.

That’s all for now, Folks!

Pancho, our host in San Pedro de Atacama, told us that he would have recommended us to skip staying the night in Calama, and just take the night bus up to Arica from San Pedro de Atacama, but by then, we had already booked everything that would happen to take us into Calama and out again the next day. Pancho also said that Calama was the ‘ugliest city in Chile’ but that it would be good for us to experience that.

Today we left the hostel and went to town. My father and I rented bikes to ride for an hour, while my sister and mother went out shopping. Father and I went out towards the geysers, and then, about 40 minutes into our hour, we started coming back. Back at the bike rental shop, we got my father’s driver’s license and started towards the hostel. On the way, we stopped and chatted with our Canadian friends from yesterday’s sandboarding.

When we got back to the hostel, my mother and sister were already there, so my mother and I played a game of chess. I won. From there, I watched the Simpsons on the TV while my father chatted with the Brazilian man that went with us three days ago on the full day tour. After that, we got on a bus and went to Calama, where we checked into our hotel to spend the night.

That’s all for now, Folks!

Jen, Ted, Eryn, Mother, Father, three young women, and I went sandboarding today. Jen and Ted are backpacking around the world for six and a half months, ending up in Sydney, Australia, where they plan to live and work…For a little while at least. The three young women spoke mostly Spanish, but knew some English.

We all got in a van at the office and went off to Death Valley, where we planned to sandboard. The road was very washed out, but by going in a zig-zag line and not looking over the edge, we made it to the dunes.

The first thing that I noticed was that it was a tall dune. Tall dunes are nice when one is at sea level, but up at 7500 feet, it is less fun. We went up the dunes and got our bindings on, before I zoomed slowly down the hill. At the bottom, I climbed back up again, starting a cycle where I went down and then up, over and over again.

On my last run, I went from a high point and did spins, going down, down, down, trying not to get sand in my eyes while still trying not to slow down too much. At the bottom, we packed up the sandboards and left for the Moon Valley, for sunset.

While waiting for sunset to happen, I made a stack of rocks almost as tall as I was, testing its strength by throwing rocks at it and watching it not fall down. After sunset, when we left, I saw an annoying man tossing rocks at my beautiful tower. I hope it is still standing.

That’s all for now, Folks!

After two days of doing almost the exact same thing, the Australians split from our schedule. Joy, the sister-in-law of David, left early this morning before we even woke up, but we saw David and Gloria, his wife, at breakfast. During breakfast, we talked about their schedule, they were leaving at two.

We spent the whole morning vegging around, poring over our electronics. My mother and I went out and did some shopping, and my mother got a table cloth at a local shop. When we got back, we talked about what to do, and in the end we voted to go on a sandboarding trip tomorrow evening, with the parents just watching the kids go sandboarding.

On our walk to our daily ice cream, we stopped at several sandboarding places and got some information about times and such before finally eating our ice cream in the plaza. When we got back to the hostel, the Australian couple was gone, and we got ready to go on a walk to an abandoned city, which we did, after a 3 km walk, and then we ate dinner, which was very delicious, with quinoa and other scrumptious items.

That’s all for now, Folks!

The baby vicuña ran down the dusty dirt road, going this way and that, trying to find a way out of the road and up the hill to where its parents were. The driver was unsympathetic, driving the baby down the road away from the others. Suddenly, out of the shadows, there rang a high-pitched voice,

“Isn’t it CUTE!!!”

The light changed and the new lighting showed that the speaker was my mother. We figured that she wasn’t talking about the driver, but we couldn’t be sure, so we kept our mouths shut. Eventually, the vicuña found a spot where it could scramble up the slope and all was well.

That is what happened during our full day tour in the Atacama Desert and Salar. We started out in a large van with the Australian man and women, another man from our hostel, a Bolivian woman, and a couple from London. We started out by going to a town where we saw some llamas and some hand knitted sweaters, blankets, and mittens. After that we went to some flamingo lakes out in the salt pans, and then went high up into the mountains.

After going far up and seeing two lagoons, we went back down, and that was where we saw what happened in the first paragraphs. Then we went down to the valley, ate lunch, and drove back to our hostel, where I played chess with David and Joy, his sister-in-law, the teacher.

That’s all for now, Folks!

Jerry: Doctor, Orthopedic Surgeon, Steak Knife Wielder

Susan: Patient, Cast Owner

Ethan: Assistant Doctor, Holder of Gigantic Scissors and Steak Knife

Eryn: Media

On doctor’s orders, my father cut some of my mother’s cast off today, making her be able to bend her elbow, and she is very pleased with that. The time that we did the operation was about midday, when the sun was shining directly on us. My father got a plain old steak knife from the kitchen and I got a pair of scissors from the laundry room, before going to the operating chair, where my mother was seated and wincing in anticipation.

My father began by cutting horizontally around where he was going to make the final cut, and then did a vertical cut. With a rip, he took a chunk of the cast off, tossing it in the trash can that I had brought along. He continued on doing this until he got it close down to the first cut, and then used the scissors to cut off the final bit off cotton and cast.

After all of that was done and another few hours had slipped away, we went on a tour with some Brisbanites from Australia. They were very talkative once we got to the lagoon, and David talked about his home in Queensland. His wife and sister in law, pharmacist and teacher, respectively, were with him on an annual 4-week trip around South America. They were all very nice.

That’s all for now, Folks!

This morning I woke up and lay in my bed, looking down at the pillow and seeing the light spill into my room from the bathroom. I heard my sister get annoyed and heard the words ‘water’ and ‘not working.’ So I literally put one and one together and figured out that the water was not working. I didn’t get to take a shower.

After lugging all of our luggage down to the bottom of our staircase, our driver, Louis, came and picked us up to take us to the Santiago Airport. I slept the whole way, so I don’t know what happened, if anything. When we got to the airport, we got in the line and waited our way through to the check-in, where we checked our bags and got our boarding passes.

Security was fast, luckily, so when we got to the gate, they were right about to leave, and we weren’t left behind to find another way to Calama. As I said, we were right on time, and we caught our flight to Calama. Calama is a mining town, popping up when there was a mine of copper found nearby. When we touched down in Calama, we saw that it was a small airport, and when we got inside, we had no trouble locating our travel service to San Pedro de Atacama.

I, as usual, slept the whole ride, and woke up when we arrived, seeing mud and brick walls, bicycles, dogs, and people. For a population of about 1500 people, a lot of them are dedicated to the tourist industry. The hostel that we are staying in is nice, nicer than in Uluru, but not so nice as, say, the MD House. But it is okay.

That’s all for now, Folks!

The most interesting part of our day was spent doing something that is not very interesting; walking. When we left this afternoon to get some sandwiches for a lunch-dinner to get to bed early tonight, my mother had picked the place where she thought we should go.

Of we went…We went over to another street and then down some of the ubiquitous steps. Before we went down a set, though, my father pointed out another direction that we should go to get to where we wanted to go. We went down the hill for a while before arriving at a street. We decided that we were on the wrong street, and went down the hill to a large intersection and then up a one-way street. After following the twists and turns through a neighborhood, we decided that we were on the wrong street and that, actually, the one that we had come in on was the correct one.

Back in the intersection, we went up the one that had brought us there in the first place and up. It seemed like a more likely place to have the restaurant, but there was no restaurant in sight, even though we went up a long ways. We finally all agreed that we were on the wrong street (again!) and went back down and to the other street that went up the hill that we hadn’t been on.

About one block up, we came upon the restaurant that we had been searching for one hour. Sadly though, after all of that walking, we were barred from the entrance and shown a sign that said that it was a bar and there were no children under the age of 18 allowed, but in Spanish.

That’s all for now, Folks!

We left around noon, as usual, and went down the hill with a large box to mail home. We talked as we walked and named a new cat, which is on the top of the list:

As you can see, we have named a lot, and we have also named some dogs, but I have decided not to go into that today. As I said: We were walking down the hill, and then, my father, who was carrying the large, heavy box, slid on the slippery tile work that goes down the center of the sidewalk and fell. Luckily, he never let go of the box and fell on his butt, so it wasn’t too bad, but his left leg got all bloody.

After dropping off the box at the post office, we went all the way up the hill to the house of the poet Neruda. The house looked large from the outside, but on the inside it only had one bedroom. Still, it was a cool house because each floor was smaller than the one before itself. On the very top, there was only one room, which was the poet’s study. It had a very good view.

That’s all for now, Folks!

In the morning we got out of bed,
lined up at the table to get fed.
Doing some schoolwork to get ahead,
trying not to just go back to bed.

Leaving around noon or there about,
Going to the stairs for another bout.
Walking, walking, always towards the hill,
we always seem to be staying still.

From then on we went towards the hill, finally stopping where there was a tunnel going straight into the side of the hill like a wound bleeding humans. We decided to go in and when we got to the end, we took an elevator up. The called the whole thing an Ascensor. It was probably my favorite one that we have ever rode.

That’s all for now, Folks!

We left the house this morning at about noon. We first walked up and looked at a large church right up our hill that had been ringing its bells recently before going down another street until its end. The end of the road was actually just the end of where one could drive, and there were stairs going down the hill from there on. We took a staircase down and passed a cat eating leaves off a bush, though it could have just been scratching.

At the bottom of the stairs, we took a right and then took a left, heading towards the port. We passed by a plaza called Plaza Anibal Pinto where there were good looking ice cream flavors. We voted to keep going towards Cerro Concepción, a hill that we had been to a few days ago with on our walking tour, also holding the number one rated restaurant in all of Valparaiso and its 43 hills. We went over to the Ascensor Concepción and paid 300 Chilean Pesos each to go up the hill the fast way. With a lurch, we went up the hill.

We walked for a while before arriving at the door of the Baker Street Café that wasn’t on Baker Street. Inside, we ate sandwiches and brownies and drinking chocolate submarines (chocolate and hot milk), Mochachinos, and water and sugaring ourselves up before deciding to go back to the ice cream plaza and get some more sugar. Yum!

After the ice cream, we decided to go to the supermarket to buy supplies and food to eat at home tonight and to have actual cereal, not just cereal that tasted like the box it came out of.  At the market, we were buying some vegetables when suddenly, the ground lurched, and all the ceiling signs and the bananas started swinging back and forth but it stopped just as abruptly as it had started. I thought it was really fun, as it was my first earthquake, but my mother wasn’t as enthusiastic about the quake.

That’s all for now, Folks!

Back when we were in South Africa, in Cape Town, the reader may recall that we went to an amusement park called Ratanga Junction. There, and other places as well, there were large ship-like rides that worked like giant swings. Well, there is one here in Valparaiso that is only about US$1 to ride. It is in a park near our apartment and is very fun: I know that because I rode it.

After eating breakfast this morning, we vegged around a while on the couch doing crossword puzzles and such before finally deciding to go out on a walk to see the ocean, see the arch, look at some parks, and eat ice cream. We achieved all of those, but the part that was most interesting to me was when I went on the swinging ship.

We had walked down the hill and had completed the last thing on our list; eating ice cream, and were browsing through the parks. We went through the one that we had been by earlier and then went on to the one on the other side of a far street. There were several swings and a couple of small rides, the one that looked the most fun was the swinging ship.

I coughed up my $500 Chilean Pesos and got my token to ride. When another person got their token, she and I got to ride on opposite ends. It started up, and with a creak and a groan we started to swing higher and higher and faster and faster until we were nearly vertical. With that vertical swinging, I was very glad that there was a bar across my lap holding me down. Eventually, I was brave enough to hold my arms up for two full swings at full power before holding onto the pole again.

That’s all for now, Folks!

Today was a day where we got some of the exercise that the body needs every day. The reason for that is that we went up and down the long flights of stairs near our house to get away and to it 3 times throughout the course of the day when the sun was in the sky and when the first stars were starting to come out of the blanket of darkness that had settled around us, blotting out all glimpses of the sun as it continued to light other parts of the earth in our continuing circle around the star.

We woke up and ate the breakfast that we had bought at a supermarket last night before sitting around and reading books. After that, we arranged a tour from ‘Tours 4 Tips’ with Nacho, and then went into town to look for money to pay our guide, Benjamin. When the guide arrived and after we had gone up the flights of stairs once to get back from the bank, it turned out that he was not Benjamin, that Benjamin was busy, and that our new guide’s name was Francisco. As the tour was a walking tour, we went by foot until reaching the bottom of our hill (one of 43 in the city) and taking a trolley bus over to the port. The reason for the trolley bus, our guide had explained, was because it took a long time to get to the port by foot and he didn’t want to use up our precious time of 3 hours.

At the port, we got off the bus and looked out across the blue-green water filled with boats of all shapes and sizes, from great cruise ships, to small fishing boats, to cargo boats, almost every type of boat was accounted for. While he explained how there were a lot of poor people around begging and pickpocketing from people, a beggar came up as though top prove his point. We looked out over the Navy building, which was blue, and under one of the arches, an ornate plaque with curls said ‘Armada de Chile,’ the Armada of Chile. Out in the harbor, there were also several large, gray, metal, dull, Navy ships, sitting by the edge of the port, as if being springs, waiting for someone or something to push their luck to far and have them push them away, maybe down to Davy Jones’ locker, but who knows?

From there on, we walked along one of the streets and imagined it in its former glory, all stonework, buzzing, humming, and alive with people, sounds, smells, and sights. All normal sights, except now, instead of having people on balconies lining up their laundry on a line or listening to the radio with a beer and a friend or two, there is nothing but boarded up windows and crumbling banisters, supporting arches cracked under their weight that they have been bearing for years, not complaining as they are stone, unyielding until the end. Another house that we went into also used to be full of glory, though it had not lost as much of its grandeur. It still had green onyx steps and English oak floorboards, still carved doors and banisters and wall panels. But in the end, under it all, there was an incompleteness;  the onyx was cracked, the floorboards faded and scuffed, the carvings on doors were, in some cases, almost completely rubbed away by people touching them. The roof used to be glass, classy and in style. Now someone has replaces that style and touch with some thin corrugated material, yellow and blue and hardly held together. In the end, it was an almost pitiful display of what was once one of the richest streets in all of Latin America now reduced to shambles.

We went back out of what used to be the rich section and went up an ascencio, which is like an elevator that goes up hills on a track like a train on a very steep incline. At the top, we paused for a minute and marveled at the architecture of a building that turned out to be a free museum that we didn’t have time to go to at the moment, but planned to later. We then heard about how graffiti artists respected the street artists and if you had your house painted by a street artist, most of the ‘taggers’ wouldn’t touch your house. We walked past several up-to-date restaurants with views and a large selection of wine and immersed ourselves in learning why there were small, de-elevated sections in the middle of some alleys; they were for horses and rainwater and horse poop, to wash it all away when the rains came, letting there be a clean slate to start over again. We then walked down several streets and into a trolley car and then back up our hill, making it twice. Eventually, we went out to eat, and then down the hill for ice cream, having to come back up again to get home for the night, making it three times coming up the hill to go home.

That’s all for now, Folks!

Two Days Ago:

We woke up and ate pie and fruit for breakfast before waiting outside of the hostel for the man with a tour bus to take us away from Valdivia for a day and go around to waterfalls and such. When our tour guide arrived, he was with a lady who, unlike himself, could speak some English.

We were off. Our first stop wasn’t really a stop as such, we just waited for a ferry to come to our side of the river and take us to the other. From there we went to a gravel bed in a turn of the river and climbed up past blackberry vines, eating some, to the railway bridge that spanned the bridge.

The bridge was not in use anymore, and José, our guide, and I walked along the ties, jumping from one to the next all the way across the river. Everyone else walked along the edge where there was a handrail. At the far side of the river, we went by a house and ate some apples, took pictures of flowers, and then walked back across the river on the bridge.

From there we went to several other places, not the least of which was Huilo Huilo, a waterfall that had enough mist to make a rainbow visible through a camera. Other things that we did included walking by a church, walking on the beach of the lake, kicking stones off a cliff, and eating dinner near Argentina.

Yesterday:

Yesterday we didn’t do much; we walked along the waterfront in Valdivia and tried out the regional drink-Mote con Hueslos or something along those lines- before walking to the mall for some ice cream.

After ice cream, we walked for a while before going back to the hostel, getting our stuff, and going to the bus station. At the bus station, we waited, and right on time, in one of the slots, appeared our 2130 hrs. bus to take us to Santiago. We got on the bus and went off to sleep, and when we awoke, we were in Santiago.

Today:

We waited…and waited, but our appointed driver never showed up. Eventually, he called back and said that he sent a representative for himself to take us to where we needed to go; Valparaiso.

The new driver showed up soon, and with his good English skills, began to show us around Santiago in his van and walking. After walking around for about an hour, we got back in the van and started our drive away from Santiago. Eventually, after a very long tunnel, we got some lunch-chicken legs. From there we drove all the way to Valparaiso and got checked into our apartment, where we are now.

That’s all for now, Folks!

We woke up this morning and did everything as usual right until we walked out of the electronically-opening gate. The only exception was that my mother and I walked to the laundry facilities and dropped off a load to be washed, dried, and ready to pick up at the end of the day.

We walked down the river towards the omnibus terminal where we had come in at night, and went past that a ways. When we got to a street corner, we looked at our map and there was supposed to be a tower right at that corner, but it had seemingly disappeared. We walked up this new street, and there another block up the street was a small tower that had been a dungeon.

We saw a park nearby, and presumed that it was the large park that we had seen on the map. It wasn’t. After sitting on some of the benches for a while, we saw some trees that looked like the park that we wanted and went over there, stopping on the way for some ice cream. At the large park, as it was the large park, we lounged around on the exercise equipment and the playground and did flips. Eryn was interested in hanging by the back of her knees from a bar six feet above the ground, while I preferred to climb some poles that were very tall.

That’s all for now, Folks!

I watch it through a haze, as though other thoughts cloud my vision in a way of trying to get to the forefront of my mind so I might focus on them, the sad thoughts, the proud thoughts, and the boring thoughts, all trying to get accepted. But I need to focus, everyone around is staring at the men that march in black, white, and red uniforms with an orange and red striped flag that they raise to a flagpole.

I remember what had happened for us to arrive here, and I review it unconsciously in my head while I watch what is happening. My family and I woke up and ate this morning and then sat and read for a while. I read a book called Dodger and everyone else did their own thing. We finally left for a boat tour that we had booked yesterday that had ‘no announcements and the only time that someone talked on a microphone was when questions were asked.

They were wrong. I think that as I watch the soldiers march up the stairs to where we are, the drummer tapping a steady beat on a drum, while the men hold either swords of muskets, while the man at the back only holds up his pants. When we had gotten on the boat, we were privy to loads and loads on announcements by a man who though he was funny in Spanish, but since we couldn’t understand a word of what he said, it wasn’t funny.

We had sailed for a while before docking in a town and seeing a fort before going back to the boat. From there we went across the bay to a town called Corral and went up to the fort there, where they were just about to do a show. The men now get called to arms and crowd next to the guns with their old muskets pointed down to below. Suddenly, there is a shout, and a unit of men in blue rush up the slope. As opponents and protectors of the fort that we are standing on, the men in red are bound by duty to do what they have to do to keep the fort.

There is a scuffle and suddenly, after a sedate swordfight of only four metal clangs, the men in red are standing before us, heads down, defeated. Their swords, what little of them are left, are taken away, along with flags, muskets, and a derringer from the captain.  The blue captain sheaths his broadsword and points his ceremonial sword to the top of the flagpole as the red and orange flag goes down and the Chilean flag goes up.

That’s all for now, Folks!

We have gone to a market several times, and each time has been different. The market in question is the disputable fish market, disputable because it sells lots more than fish; from flowers to blueberries to lettuce. So, in theory, though it would probably be considered to be a fish market by some, I believe that it would be a public food market.

Today we went to the aforementioned market, and, like yesterday but unlike the day before, we bought something, but not before we did some other things. Those ‘other things’ are something like this: We walked through the market and watched people sell fish. Once through the open air market with the colorful roof, we continued on past the main tourist area to where there was a map of the world, well, at least a world that had only Chile and Antarctica in it. From there, we watched a silver pendulum swing back and forth on some sort of compass which we couldn’t figure out.

From there, we went to the edge of a submarine and looked at the black metal and the seal at the end before heading back to the market. At the market, we bought a kilo of cherries and a kilo of blue berries before going back to the room. The cherries and blueberries are very good.

That’s all for now, Folks!

S– Showering early to face the day

E– Eating breakfast, before us lay

A-Arriving home, the parents come,

L-Laying out the work to be done

S-Schoolwork for now for one and all

C-Cold rain feeling good to us,

L-Dad and I walk to get a bus

I-Inclined to travel, someday soon

N-North towards Peru, whistling a tune

I-Instructed by the doctor how,

C-Cut off some cast, but not right now

S-Sad that mother didn’t get cut

F-Following our instinct to walk

I-I go to the river and talk

S-Saying to my sister dearest

H-‘Hey, let’s go to the restaurant nearest’

‘It’s broken.”

Was what we heard at the doctor’s office in Argentina, and because of that fall, my mother now has a cast that she will probably have to wear for a long time, yet. Or not. According to the doctor that we went to today at a clinic in Valdivia, there might be some way out of that.

After arriving in Valdivia last night, we went to our hostel and checked in. After sleeping in, we woke up and went down for breakfast, where we ate fruit and bread and a little bit of fruit pie. Then, since we didn’t have much money, we decided to go to town to go to an ATM.

When we finally got to the clinic, we had figured out that no ATMs took US cards for some reason, and because we had accidently left father’s passport at the hostel, we weren’t able to go to a real live teller who might be able to give us money. Anyway, at the clinic, there were, surprisingly, a large amount of English speaking workers who helped us get to the right doctor, who told us to come in at 1920 hrs.

At 1920 hrs, we were at the clinic, and the doctor received my mother and finished diagnosing her before releasing here to us again, after extracting an 0800 hrs appt. tomorrow morning. As it turns out, the radius was actually broken in two places, once all the way through, and another time splitting that small section down the middle.

Also, here ulna had a crack in it. They said that, if the gap between the bones at the end of her radius were more than 2 millimeters apart in their CT scan, then they would do surgery and attach all the bones together with a metal plate, and then she won’t even have to have the cast any more. That is why I am hoping the gap is large.

That’s all for now, Folks!

We woke up yesterday tired but ready to go. After mostly packing, we went downstairs to where the breakfast area was set out for the people staying at the Villa Sofia Hotel. After eating scrumptious chocolate bread and other delicious items, we went back upstairs and finished packing.

After stuffing everything in the boot of our tiny, clunky, badly-made, red Fiat Sienna, we took off. We decided to go around until we found a place to park and then buy some chocolate from an ever present chocolate shop. The traffic, as usual, was horrible. There were no stop signs and next to zero places to park. Finally, after going past lots of full parking places, we found one on a side lane several blocks away from where we wanted to be. Oh well.

After getting our chocolate and going back to the car, my father drove my mother and me to the bus station with all of our stuff while my sister and father went out to return the car. Eventually, after an hour of waiting after the scheduled departure time, the bus arrived and we got on. The seats were surprisingly nice, but couldn’t lay back all the way, unlike the other bus that we rode to Bariloche.

We rode and rode until we got to the first border post, where they stamped our passports and had a dog sniff through our luggage, before going through about 10 kilometers of no-man’s-land. While we were driving through no-man’s-land, we noticed how there were 10 foot high walls of gravel, or pumice, we couldn’t tell which. At the end, the put a dog with our luggage and away we went.

That’s all for now, Folks!

We woke up this morning, and when we got out of bed, we inhaled a breakfast of 7 nectarines, toast, and some pastries. After that was finished, we finished up on packing our bags to leave. When my father opened the door to look outside, the gray cat, Luna, jumped on the porch and ran straight inside. She ran around inside before finally settling down on a chair cushion.

When we were just about ready, Mary-Lou came up and told us the sad news that Paz and Juan had come up to say good bye but we were not up yet then, so she got their email addresses for us. We then got in the car and left for Bariloche.

On the way to Bariloche, we decided to go on a long side-trip to a park that had a large lake in it. We paid the entrance fee and then entered. We drove for a long ways before stopping at a viewpoint and chatting with some Americans from North Carolina. Once finished with that, we continued.

At the end of the road, after several view points, we walked up a trail until we came to a stream. From there, we viewed the large mountain that looked like a large matterhorn. It had lots and lots of blue glaciers on its spires and waterfalls were coming down the sides. In the end, we went back down the trail to a restaurant and bought some food before leaving for Bariloche, where we are now eating ice cream.

That’s all for now, Folks!

By bow in the title, I mean something like the weapon that Robin Hood used in his escapades where he took from the rich and gave to the poor. Yesterday, Juan and his father, Juan, worked on two bows, finishing one and starting on another. Today, Juan and I worked on the second one, whittling it down and sanding off the rough parts.

In the middle of all of these time using occupations, Eryn and I got invited to dine with the large family of Juan, Juan, Juan’s mother, Juan’s mother-in law, Juan’s mother-in-law’s husband, Juan’s sister, Juan’s brother, and Juan’s brother. If you want to have names entered in there instead of just relations to Juan, father and son, then the list, respectively, would be Juan-Cruz, Juan, Juan’s wife, Mary-Lou, May-Lou’s husband, Paz, Lucas, and José. After watching them all consume a pile of chicken breasts, Eryn and I consumed the delicious freshly made strawberry ice cream.

Once finished with lunch, Juan and I worked some more with the bow and strung it. While Juan worked with some strange contraption, I shot the new bow and it worked well. Once Juan gave up, and while Eryn and Paz swam in the frigid water of the recently-filled pool, Juan and I worked on making arrows. I still haven’t finished mine.

That’s all for now, Folks!

Today, when we went outside, Juan and his father were working on making a bowstave to make a new bow for Juan. I helped them with it; shaving it with a knife before sanding it down. Sadly, right before they were about to string it to shoot it, my family threatened me into the car and we had to go to the Rio Azul…again.

At the river, we went to a place that had two bridges spanning the water from one side to the other. One of the bridges was a nice new suspension bridge with evenly placed plywood slats, while the other one was more of two cables with small logs spanning the gap in between the two cables, while two tiny cables served as handrails. It was also tilting to almost vertical. Fun, fun, fun.

Sadly, we didn’t go on that one, instead, my father and sister opted to go about an hour’s walk up the river to another bridge. Since they are the ones that have all the say in our family, my mother and I had to trudge dutifully behind. After finding a nice and pretty beach with en-suite grass patch, we entered a debate upon what we should do.

In the end, my sister and father agreed on going to the bridge, coming back to the beach, and then eating the cookies that we had brought. We did that. At the bridge, we looked at it, and it looked like a mix between the two that we saw earlier. It was made out of both plywood and logs and was made out of ½ inch cable. My father, sister, and I went across and took pictures out over the water of the blue Rio Azul before heading back.

That’s all for now, Folks!

We woke up and went through the motions of getting to go yet again today, but this time we had an actual place in mind as we set out at about 1300 hrs. We rode up the bumpy rode in our screechy-scratch-low-power Fiat for a while, before finally getting to the trailhead. We started walking. At the first stopping point, we chatted with an American couple that had been to Antarctica. They were lucky. If we had gone to Antarctica, we would have gone to every single continent on planet Earth.

Anyway, after that, we continued up the hill. When we reached the carved forest we just went around it and didn’t pay to go through it. At the Refugio, we went inside the small café and ordered pizzas and drinks. After getting our drinks and being told to wait for the pizza, we went back out and admired the view.

After finishing up on the top, we went back down the way that we had come to get back to the car. Eryn, my father, and I were a ways ahead of my mother when suddenly she cried out:

‘HELP, HELP!!!”

Eryn and I, in our complete adrenaline rush, ran back up the mountainside that we had been so tired on coming up. Our mother was on the ground, clutching a wrist that looked to be dislocated. My father got back up, eventually, and he helped her up. We were moving again. We took a while getting back, and finally we did get to the bottom and drove to the hospital.

At the hospital, my mother was taken in with my father and the only communication was by texting. After about an hour of standing around in the waiting room, my father came out and got us into the car and told us the story while we followed the ambulance to a private clinic. At the clinic, the looked at her x-ray and told that she couldn’t have her surgery for a while, so we got her book for her and went outside to eat, since she couldn’t. After dinner, we checked on Mother before Father drove Eryn and I home.

After having dinner with the landlords and their family, Eryn and I went up the hill to meet with my mother and father. My mother’s arm was all incased in plaster and cotton, but other than that, she seemed fairly okay.

The next Day:

Well, my mother is feeling better, which is good. Today we slept in a lot after staying up till past midnight last night, or this morning, whichever way you want it, and then woke up. Too bad. After Eryn and I made breakfast and washed the dishes after it, we went out on a drive.

After completing our drive that included the laundry place, the clinic for x-rays, and the grocery store, we came back home and relaxed some more. Eventually, we decided to go to Lago Puelo, so we set off. On the way we stopped at an ice cream shop to buy a kilo of ice cream to eat later. At the lago, we looked out over the water whenever we didn’t have our heads buried in ice cream.

By total accident, when I was walking, I heard honking, looked, and there were Juan, Paz, Lucus, Phillipe, and more riding in their cars towards the lago. I raced back to tell my folks before changing into a swimsuit and going back. When everyone got settled on the beach, Juan and I took turns pumping up a yellow rubber raft that we wanted to paddle around.

We were so slow at paddling the raft that eventually we just jumped in and pulled it, which worked, but the water was cold. After that, we went back to shore to warm up. I had observed both Paz and Eryn making bracelets that they put on a keychain, but where did they go?

I got my answer today when I saw Lucus, a blond-haired 6-ish year old selling them to other families and people on the beach. We heard that last year, Paz made almost 300 pesos worth selling her bracelets. Finally, Juan’s father changed into his swimsuit and agreed to paddle Juan and I out into Lago Puelo. As he is a much better paddler, we went out far against the current. Eventually, Juan and I jumped into the water and swam to shore from far out while Juan’s father got a luxury three person raft all to himself.

That’s all for now, Folks!

Those are the Spanish words for red, yellow, green, and blue. The one that was on our maps and minds today was the last one: blue. Well, actually, the main one that we used today was actually Azul, as in blue, and I won’t keep translating it, but remember that Azul=Blue.

Today we woke up and went through the motions of getting ready to go. After lacing up our hiking boots, we went down into town to drop off some laundry. After getting that done, we went up past our driveway again and to the trailhead of the trail to Cerro Mirador, on the top of the hill that we reside on. After walking up the trail to the top with the viewpoint, we took pictures and then moved on.

After going through, town, we went across a small stream and headed up to a viewpoint of the Rio Azul (Blue River).  From there we drove down to the river and I moved heavy rocks while everyone else in my family sat on large rocks and logs. The river was chilly, and while we were there, we watched two horses cross the blue-colored river about 50 meters downstream.

That’s all for now, Folks!

Well, I made a new friend. The only boys that were about my age on this trip before were Goonpat in India on the camel safari and Marcel in Namibia. Now, however, there is another. His name is Juan-Crews but everybody just calls him Juan. This morning I finally met him, and we pretty much played all day. At the beginning, we played soccer with two younger boys and then one, then we played by ourselves for a while.

In the evening, we pumped up a raft before I got spirited away for supper. After that, when I got back, one of the younger boys was paddling the inflatable raft around in the tiny pool, so mostly he was just splashes. Since my family had decided against going to Lago Puelo, so Juan’s nice father decided to take Juan, his wife, his baby, himself, and me along with the giant inflated raft to the Lago.

When we got to the Lago, there were large waves going up and down. We finished inflating the raft and Juan and I pushed off. Because of the current, we went sideways as much as we went out. We paddled for a while before riding back in with the current. After dragging the raft back over the bumpy and annoying rocks, we arrived to where Juan’s parents had staked out their place before going out in the raft again, but this time with Juan’s father. Juan’s father was appointed the oarsman, Juan the captain, and I the first mate, as we paddled out. For fun, Juan and I back flipped off the side of the raft and into the cold water. When we got back to shore, we went for a swim before packing up and heading for home.

That’s all for now, Folks!

Today we awoke from our night’s rest in Bariloche to the dawn of a new day, a couple of hours after dawn. After getting all cleaned up and somewhat packed, we went out for breakfast. Sadly, though, the breakfast area was all locked up, so we just had some of the meager amounts of food that we had brought from BA.

After checking out of our room, we went out in our bright red Fiat that was clunky and barely went backwards to the meadows and hills and lakes surrounding Bariloche.  After the grocery and chocolate store, our first stop was at a place that had ski lifts to get up to the top. We rode up to the top and looked around before riding the lift back down. After that we drove for a while before stopping at a lakeside. I went down and felt the water before deciding that it was warm enough to swim in.

After changing into my swimsuit, and lunged out into the deeper waters and lunged back out because it was so cold. However, after waiting some time, I went back out to a rock. From there, I went deeper to another rock, and so on and so forth until I was over deep-ish water and I back-flopped in from a large black rock. I stayed swimming around on my back for some time before swimming back out. Then we left and went on a drive to where we are now: El Bolson.

That’s all for now, Folks!

Well, for all of you who don’t know, Bariloche is famous for its chocolate. We, after 21 hours of riding a bus, have arrived in just that location. The bus services that we used were the ones by the name of Via Bariloche. They all go to Bariloche and we used one of the ones from Buenos Aires.

The bus that we rode in was a double decker bus that had little screens for each seat. What we should have guessed was that all the videos would be in Spanish. Anyway, we rode on the top of the two levels and we got the 4 seats on the right in the front two rows. The row in the front with Eryn and I had views out of the front too, so you could see where we were going. After eating the dinner that we brought, the ‘flight attendant’ came up and gave us more food. Then we went to bed.

In the morning we woke up and ate the supplied breakfast before reading until we pulled into the station. From there, we rode in a taxi to the main drag to look for the rental car place, but it was invisible to us muggles, I guess. In the end, we just had the driver drive us to our hotel and from there we got out and went down to see the chocolates. The chocolates were good and when we got back, our bright red car was sitting in the car park gleaming and just waiting for someone to drive it.

That’s all for now, Folks!

Today we did several things, some of them fun, some of them annoying. All of them, though, were things that took up time while we waited for this day to end and tomorrow to go half-way so that we could hop on to a bus and relax for the 20 hour journey across Argentina to a place called San Carlos de Bariloche. In one of the books that Eryn has re-read several times on this trip ‘360 Degrees Longitude’ the author describes how the streets smell like chocolate and every other shop is a chocolate one.

Today, in preparation for the long bus ride, we went to the Carrefour grocery store to buy some things. But since that wasn’t the first thing that we did, I will try to tell you the story of today from the beginning. We woke up this morning (as usual) and ate breakfast (still the usual) before heading out on a walk to check (again) if Wafles SUR is open. So far so ordinary. After that, things started to differ, though not that much. We went to the plaza of Colonel Dorrego after loitering outside of Habibi for their free wi-fi and for ordering some takeout for tomorrow. At the plaza, we just stood around outside while my father finished up some things before we decided to go to Sumo ice cream shop. When we got there, everything was barred, but the doors were wide open so we waited across the street in the park for the shop to open. Some people went inside, and we took that as a good sign and got ice cream and went home.

After waiting at home several hours, my father, mother, and I went out to the plaza again for orange juice and wi-fi before checking on Wafles SUR, which, as usual, was closed. We then went to the Carrefour Express and bought some water and stuff before returning back home, where we are now. Soon we will go to the Italian restaurant for dinner before turning in for the night.

That’s all for now, Folks!

Today we did just what I mentioned in my title; we sat at Starbucks. We woke up this morning and we got out of bed, we took showers and then brushed the hair, on our heads. Wait a minute, that sounds a little bit too rhyming, so I will try it again: This morning we woke up and took showers, after that we had a breakfast of pasta, pizza, and cereal. That may seem completely loaded with carbohydrates, and it probably is, but we didn’t have all of that each, we each only got one of the items on the list that I mentioned.

After breakfast, we lounged around and did schoolwork, mainly math, before heading out to Waffles SUR to get some waffles. As it turned out, Waffles SUR was closed, as it was yesterday, so we just decided to head to Starbucks because we needed some Wi-Fi. At Starbucks, we ordered coffee and some food and checked out the Wi-Fi, which was slow. Finally, after looking around some, my father found a Wi-Fi network that worked whenever you were near a city park. We got that, and then used that for a while before my mother decided to go the local pharmacy before going back to the apartment.

While my mother and sister were off, my father and I used the park Wi-Fi to call one of his colleagues at work to talk. After he finished, we got some freshly squeezed orange juice from one of the local carts and then walked home while drinking it. When we got home, my mother and sister arrived back successful and we all just sat down and did what we thought needed to be done.

That’s all for now, Folks!

Today we went a lot of places; the Evita Museum, a small ecological reserve in the middle of town, and to a place to get money. We went first to see if Waffles Sur was open, which it wasn’t, and then we continued to the Independencia Subte (Metro) Station. When we got off at the General San Martin Estacion, we walked across the largest street in the world: the Avenue de Julio. After going up to the regular money transfer place to get a few more pesos, we got back on the Subte and rode until we got to the Italia Estacion before getting off and going into a park.

That park turned out to be the aforementioned small ecological reserve. We went in the closest door to us, and then we found a shady area with a bench and ate some cookies that we had bought at a local supermarket. To our surprise, there were resident cats, and we tried to attract their attention, but they never seemed to see us. After watching the big gray cat jump up on the bench with Eryn and then jump down, she left, and I took over. I simply distracted the cat with a straw wrapper and then caressed it. I don’t think it started purring, but it was happy.

When we got up to leave, we walked and we walked, through all possible paths and all the way around the fence line before we concluded that the entrance where we came in was actually the only one that was not chained and padlocked. After that we went to the Evita Museum before heading back home.

That’s all for now, Folks!

There is a town up in the delta at one end of the Rio de la Plata that is called Tigre. It is a large-ish town with boats and cars. It is a little bit like Venice in the terms with the boats, but it is actually on the mainland and across the river are houses on all of the little tributaries.

We woke up this morning and got out of bed, ate breakfast then went down the road to the subway station. We rode all the way up to the end (Retiro) then got off and walked and walked and walked up to where there were ferry terminals. We got on a ferry and rode out of the port and across the ocean for a three hour tour in a boat called the Minnow. Actually, it wasn’t called the Minnow, but it was not unnamed, and we actually got only a two hour tour, but after riding across part of the giant (250 kilometers across, the largest in the world) river, when we got into the houses on the water, it got kind of repetitive.

When we pulled into Tigre, we went out on a walk to try and find the restaurants that were mentioned on the brochure that my father had got on the boat. We went to one restaurant and ordered salads and drinks, before continuing on to the number 5 bus stop. From there we rode to the end, then walked (unintentionally) in a loop before getting ice cream at McDonalds. Then we walked down to the train station and rode all of the way back to BsAs.

That’s all for now, Folks!

What it was and what it is, but not quite, is what I stated in my title. It was the Scottish Temple, but now it is called the Café Tortoni. We went there today after a shopping adventure along Florida Street and looking at a courtyard that supposedly housed the escape tunnels for people of importance.

It was inaugurated in 1858, by a French man called Touan. It was named Tortoni after a coffee shop in Paris with the same name. There is a library in the large and comfortable area, along with a place in the back for playing games such as dice and billiards.

We sat in some chairs around a small table and sipped at our juices and milkshakes as we studied the surrounding architecture and wall hangings. There have been a lot of famous folk in the café, including Albert Einstein and Hillary Clinton. All in all, it is a pretty nice place.

That’s all for now, Folks!

Today we went to the San Telmo Sunday Market at the Plaza Dorrego. There were a lot of shops, and there will probably be more of that later in this post. So I will not go in to detail right now. The Plaza is just two or three blocks down the street so we easily walked there to see what all of the talk was about.

There were a lot of shops dedicated to art at the beginning, and in between, there were some shops of screws and nails welded together to make little statuettes of rock stars and stuff. Then there was the loads full of antiques that ranged from colored glass bottles to old telephones. Finally, at the far end, were two of my favorite things that we saw there. One of them was a little stand were there were gel bags of gel that when you threw down on a hard surface, looked like they had exploded, but then morphed back into shape. The other shop that was my favorite was the one selling knives. There were old kitchen knives in some of the antique shops, but these ones were hunting knives and such. Several of them had interesting skin for the sheaths, and others were double bladed. Some were displayed stuck in sticks while others just stood alone with horn handles.

That’s all for now, Folks!

The aforementioned river is a very large one. However, there will probably be more of that later towards the end of this post.

Buenos Aires is on the edge of a river. It is as simple as that why we would see a river, but the way that we saw it was different that just hopping on the bus and seeing it from a side window, we walked to the river. Being in the oldest part of town, the expanders expanded on all sides from San Telmo, so the wherever we walked to, it was a ways away.

We chose to go to the Ecological Reserve to view the river. It is a big reserve, but we walked through a lot of plain parks with lots of vendors. When we finally got to the reserve, we started walking through the annoyingly hot sun and down to the river bank. On the river bank, there were lots of people chilling in the shade of the many trees in benches or just on the ground. The view of the river was good, as we were on its bank. There was no end in sight of the Rio de la Plata, and there were freighter ships out in the harbor. After oohing and aahing and taking the necessary pictures of the river, we lounged under a particularly shady tree before heading back home.

That’s all for now, Folks!

In most of the large cities that we have been to, there have been metro lines. In Sydney, New Delhi, Bangkok, and more, there were metro systems that could help people get places. One of the surprising facts was that there was no form of train or metro throughout the large metropolis of Cape Town.

Here in the Big Apple, there is a metro system that has five lines, A, B, C, D, H, and P. The one that we are closest to is the San Juan station on the D line. Last night, we went to check it out and to see what was needed. This morning, we got 4 one-way tickets to go anywhere for 10 pesos and headed off for the A line to see and ride the old original wooden train cars. The wooden trains come approximately every 3 trains, the others are the newer metal ones, and those were the ones that we wanted to ride. We eventually got on to a wooden train and sat down on the benches that were on each side of the train, jutting out like ribs. When we got to the end of the line, we just turned around and went back.

On the way back, we were in the front car and got to see out of the front window. The only problem with that was that everybody pushed my father and me out of the way and then kindly blocked the view. When we finally got off, we went up to the street to see the cemetery where Evita Peron is buried and the giant metal flower that is open in the day and closes at sunset for the night. In other news, I got a haircut by my father and I had to say goodbye to a lot of my hair…again.

That’s all for now, Folks!

A long time ago, there was a fort here in Buenos Aires that had four sides and was on the riverfront. Since then, land has been placed all around it and the dirt has swallowed up where once a might river flowed. As more tourists have started coming to Buenos Aires, around 2010, they opened a museum where the lower level of the fort used to be.

Of course, with all of that filling in with dirt, the lower level of the fort is now below ground level, so to get down there, you have to go through an x-ray machine and then down three flights of stairs to arrive at the main floor of the museum. Interestingly, the outside doesn’t look to interesting, there is a steel and glass building that has x-ray machines inside.  How interesting. I liken the feeling of walking down there to walking through a tunnel. However, one of the differences in that is that there is a glass ceiling above you that lets in a lot of light.

In the displays, there are a lot of videos about the governments through the ages. There are several sashes that various presidents wore, and in one interesting panel, there was a knife with a golden handle and a squiggly blade, though sharp. There were several canes as well, and in one there were 2 army helmets. On the opposite wall, there were a several paintings.

One of them stood out because it was very complex; there was a giant woman lying on the ground with a great bloody hole in her side, and held up on her left hand, there is Evita Peron. There is also an island of bread, and in the front, there are three groups in the foreground. Those three groups are from three different time periods. In one there are just swords, in the next there is a sword and a musket, and in the last one there is a machine gun. There were also several more parts that were very confusing, but the main focus was the dead/dying women lying on the ground holding Evita Peron.

That’s all for now, Folks!

BSAS is what the locals around here use in shorthand terms for Buenos Aires, using the first and last letters of each word to form a four-letter acronym that has a repetition to make it sound interesting while not too eye catching. Most cities back in the United States don’t have any shorthand terms for their names, except for maybe Washington, District of Colombia and Los Angeles.

Now that I have fulfilled telling you about part of my title, the first part, I will endeavor to tell you about the second part. I have often mentioned to the rest of my family when we walk around outside that it is raining, but whenever someone looks up, all they can see is blue sky. I write here before you to tell you that there is finally a solution to that poser that I (and the rest of my family) have come up with: Air Conditioners. It is in the heat of the searing summer that we have arrived in Argentina, and most people are inside with their air conditioning on high and just sitting around. As all of those air conditioners drip, whenever you walk under one; drip, drip, drip, it feels like there is rain in the air, though it is stifling hot and the sky is clear.

That’s all for now, Folks!

Today we went out and about in Buenos Aires. What we wanted to do at the beginning of the day was go to the closest information center and buy bus tickets for the yellow ‘Hop-on, Hop-off’ buses. We went out and saw the famed Plaza de Mayo before hurriedly continuing on to do what we had to do. But when we got to where the map said the information center was, lo and behold, the information center was closed. Luckily, however, they had left a sign in the window saying where the new one was and how to get there.

We left the second station to go get some cash that we had wired to ourselves. We found the place eventually, and after getting our money, we went to the store and bought a drink. When we finished drinking that, we looked at the obelisk that we had passed on the way to the money place, before finding the start of the yellow bus route. We saw the very long line and but that spot to memory before finding that they street that was under construction that housed the closed information center was actually the street that we wanted to go back up on. With that worthwhile piece of information, we started up the street to go back home.

That’s all for now, Folks!

For those of you who don’t know, Buenos Aires is the capital of Argentina, a large country in South America. We arrived here last night after a really long day after flying west from Dubai for at least 14 hours straight. When we got through all of the paperwork at the airport, we got a taxi and drove to the apartment where we are now.

After we woke up this morning, we got up and went out walking to try and find a place to eat breakfast. We sadly weren’t able to do that because we got some pastries and then went back home with a few other groceries that we had gotten. Luckily, at home, we put together some of our new groceries to form a breakfast that was good. After that, we worked on things that we should do in BA before going out for dinner. After a nice dinner, we went on a walk, before getting back to the apartment and getting ready for bed.

That’s all for now, Folks!

We have been in Dubai only three days, but we have done a lot in the little time that we have had. On the first day, we went skiing in the mall, on the second day, we went to Wild Wadi, and today we went somewhere else. That may sound vague, but if you read what follows, it might not sound so vague.

Today we went to the only open mosque in Dubai. The open means open to the public, and there are about 2000 other mosques in Dubai, but this one was the only open one. At the mosque, we learned about what Muslims believe. When we finished with that, we took a taxi to the Dubai Mall, one of the largest ones in the world. There, we took a snack of cupcakes, and then we went outside to the dancing fountain, which can shoot water 50 stories up into the air. From there, we looked up at the tallest building in the world and took photos, before heading back to the Hilton.

That’s all for now, Folks!