Mar 28, 2020 - Cancellations & RESCHEDULING!

3-28 Flight cancelled...so going to MX City today (Saturday) and just go airline to airline to find ANY flight to states anywhere and try to work our way back to Missoula somehow. Tried last minute to get flight out of Leon...no luck, heading to the City. After a four hour + bus ride (to MX City), (fully packed the second half with folks standing), we were able to take a taxi to the airport where we RESCHEDULED our flight for tomorrow morning (Sunday) at 8:30 am heading first to Atlanta, then Minneapolis St. Paul, and finally MISSOULA! See...

Mar 27, 2020 - Booking

Up early...6 am...and Bon is back on her phone attempting to book our flight back. After an hour+ she succeeded and we got confirmation from Delta. Now it’s a question of a bus to MX City (we head back to the terminal later this morning). If we can book our tickets to the City, then we can make reservations at the hostel (if it’s still open), or some other ON. We’d like to be in the City by noon on Sunday to go to the airport and make sure the flight is still a go! More later... Back from bus station where a bus to MX City leaves every 45...

Mar 26, 2020 - Decisions are made

3-26 We woke up and after breakfast took the city bus to the main bus terminal (route 1 - 8 pesos each)...a good public transport system here! At the station we asked about buses to Aguascalientes...none going today! Turns out that decisions for buses leaving to different places are made on a daily basis now. They told us to call tomorrow morning about 8 and they could tell us if/when buses might be going, most probably at 10 am and noon even though their schedule calls for 6 possible times beginning at 9! We head back to San Miguel city...

Mar 25, 2020 - Still in S M de Allende

3-25 Now in our 3rd day here and we are 2 of only 3 staying in the hostel. When we arrived there was a couple from Japan who were ending their vacation early to head back home on a flight scheduled to leave Friday, a Chinese gal who has been traveling for 2 years, most recently in South America and now heading home, a gal from Belgium also heading home, a business traveler in Mexico, and the fellow, Louis, from NYC who can work here as part of a high end construction company building a place for a wealthy Frenchman in the City. Only us and...

Mar 23, 2020 - About Pandemics

LARRY BRILLIANT SAYS he doesn’t have a crystal ball. But 14 years ago, Brilliant, the epidemiologist who helped eradicate smallpox, spoke to a TED audience and described what the next pandemic would look like. At the time, it sounded almost too horrible to take seriously. “A billion people would get sick," he said. “As many as 165 million people would die. There would be a global recession and depression, and the cost to our economy of $1 to $3 trillion would be far worse for everyone than merely 100 million people dying, because so many...

Mar 22, 2020 - Out of MX City

—— UPDATE MX Virus Responds —— Our bus is scheduled to leave north bus terminal at 11:30 am. Will take an Uber ASAP after breakfast, thanks to help of Lia, German gal, who can order it for us. The Uber driver pulled up just a few minutes after Lia ordered it. It was $70 pesos we paid Lia and we have the driver a $10 peso tip. Since we had gotten to the terminal Norte by 10:00 and our bus is not scheduled to leave till 11:15, we sat at a small cafe and had tea. We were told at the Primera Plus bus line desk that we would be checking in at...

Mar 19, 2020 - MX CITY

Copa Flight to MX City left Panama at 6:30 pm and arrived in MX City at 9:45 pm local time (one hour time change). Easy going through immigration with residency status here. With instructions to get us to the Airport Hostel where we are booked, we began our walk with taxi drivers hawking their offers all along the way. I was confused as to which terminal we were in since the instructions only mentioned “International” and “National” terminals instead of terminal 1 and terminal 2! As it turned out we were in the International terminal 2, and...

Mar 19, 2020 - On To San Carlos

The Mazatlan shore was still quite dark when the 5:15 alarm startled us into action on Thursday. While Jill showered, I treated myself to a couple of the nearly a dozen sugar rolls she had accumulated in Los Ayala. Jill had acquired this nutritional stash from her “pan man” (pan is Spanish for bread), a young fellow from one village over, whose wife or mother is a terrific baker. Announced by a penetrating front fender mounted loudspeaker, he would slowly drive through the village with the whole back end of his hatchback loaded with 2...

Mar 18, 2020 - I Don't Want To But I Have To

Wednesday, March 18 dawned as a beautiful morning in Los Ayala. It would have been a perfect day for doing some early morning stretching while catching up on the news on Sirius XM, followed by a comfortable walk about town, maybe checking a little e-mail and Facebook with a nice granola breakfast, perhaps a dip in the pool, maybe a little afternoon reading on the beach for Jill and some Field of Dreams golf for yours truly. Sad to say, all of that was in the past for this season. What really happened was the 6:00 alarm echoed in our 90%...

Feb 27, 2020 - To MX City

SLC 20 minutes early...nice layover till 9:45am then onward and upward, ha! It is simply amazing how many people are flying everywhere. Met a fellow, Ben, on the plane going to New Orleans for work on a IT cable going underwater to an oil platform. Started work with this Brit or German or Dutch owned company which started business with a fellow living in Kalispell in his garage just a year or so ago. This fellow moved to Missoula and Ben joined the business 3 months ago (he was the 3rd employee). Now the outfit has 7 employees and is...

Feb 26, 2020 - Caribbean Island Odyssey Begins

My interest in this trip is purely a selfish interest in the changes which have taken place especially since I last visited several islands at my midpoint in Peace Corps, 1966-67. Climate impacts as related by locals as well as observational impacts will be my emphasis. Sure wish I had a camera 50 years ago. But then I sure wish I'd done a lot of things different. As they say, travel is most enjoyable in hindsight, ha! The photo reflects what Lonely Planet guidebook suggests so we will drop down to Aruba after Cuba and then see what's...

Feb 25, 2020 - Buy It, Read It...Think!

This Author Captures Where I Am...to a religious person, this is something much different from what I see A preview of The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming by David Wallace-Wells: - "It is worse, much worse, than you think. The slowness of climate change is a fairy tale, perhaps as pernicious as the one that says it isn’t happening at all, and comes to us bundled with several others in an anthology of comforting delusions: that global warming is an Arctic saga, unfolding remotely; that it is strictly a matter of sea level and...