“I woke up in Denver this morning after my very uncomfortable $15 red-eye flight from Miami… with the conclusion that my Frontier AirPass sucks and in the future, the only other visit to Florida for me will be to KeyWest to visit Hemingway’s house to kick over his writing desk…”

“…Tomorrow I go to the cloud forests of Mindo and take one million billion pictures and swim under a water fall. And the location of where you live… is the place you are at this very moment. So live.”

It was more like a soft landing in Quito. It’s a brand new airport and immigration is easy and quick. I hit up a solo American traveler, a Revenue Consultant from Raleigh, NC in the immigration line to split a cab to Centro Histórico.

“…I was supposed to take a right turn at Eugene, OR and found myself driving North on the I-5 to spend a couple of nights in one of my fav places… The Seattle. Wildlife photographer, resin artist extraordinaire, mapper of cool coffee places, MsCoffeeSandy… was kind enough to take a day off from the J-O-B to do a 15,000 step birding tour of North Lake Washington.”

…I’ve never seen whales in person. I made all kinds of noises of approval and wanted to swim out to them with pleasant greetings from the bipedal beings of the landlocked places of planet earth... “hey dudes! High five!!”

I fumble much with the Spanish language but I’ve been in Latin America for a month and half, quickly approaching 2 months and the language is in the brain. So… the other day in some correspondence, I translated my Spanish to English using Google translator, and then ‘copy and pasted’ my English into a message… I was like “what the hell am I doing?!? I’ve been here too long…” and… so you know… I speak the very good English ☺️

I could not get oriented in this place. I thought I knew what direction I was going and was perpetually confused looking at google maps convinced that it was changing ordinal directions daily… something to do with being all upside down in the Southern Hemisphere is my scientific conclusion.