Ok, world!! Made it to Cape Town and have my seat in the beautiful Green Point stadium. Internet connections have been flooded, and with trips to Cape Hope and Table Mountain, blogging has taken second place.
If you click on the Photos tab, you might be able to see a few random photos.
Go team!!
Hey, everyone! Long time no chat. I brushed the dust off this ol’ site, took down the viagra ads, and you know why? Because I’m off on another trip. Yeah, South Africa for the freekin’ 2010 FIFA World Cup
Amazingly enough, I’ve got tickets for the quarter and semifinals in Cape Town and Durban, respectively. While the US is no longer in the cup, I have a feeling I’ll be catching some pretty incredible matches.
Now, I wasn’t able to fully recover the old site – most of the photo links don’t work anymore. The photos are still on Flickr, but the links themselves are bad. But the new stuff should appear just fine and I’ll fix the old links when I return.
But first, a four hour drive to JFK and a 15!! hour flight to Johannesburg, SA. Since my last trip, technology has improved a bit. I should be able to do all my blogging via my HTC Fuze. It even has a GPS for those maps I liked. Wish me luck, and they’ll be more posts while I’m on the road. If you want to track the crazy flight, go here.
Well, so much for THAT New Year’s Resolution. Over a month since the last update. Sheesh. Until this moment, I haven’t had the chance to really tell you all about the last leg of the trip, the Amazon. Suffice it to say that I am glad that I went and didn’t chicken out. It was pretty incredible!
Continue reading
It was just a few weeks ago that I was camping in a native village in the middle of the Atlantic Forest. And not too much later, I found myself in the middle of Brasília, the high-tech capitol of Brasil. There couldn’t have been more of a contrast. In the village, life stopped when the sun went down as there was no electricity. In Brasilia, night was when life just got started.
Continue reading
I’m on the road again. I have just spent a relaxing two weeks with my good friends Mike and Sarah, as well as my godson, Matty. I’d be the first to admit that we didn’t do too much. But as I’ve said before, it was good to get back on the road. Next stop is the Wichita Mountains in Oklahoma. After visiting Santa Fe, I want to drop by Mesa Verde NP and Arches NP. While near Durango, I also hope to get some horseback riding in. I’m sure it will be nose-to-tail trail riding, but I want to eventually get enough skill to do some horse packing. I will take the Durango time to figure out if the experience matches the imagination.
Before leaving Houston, I stopped to get extra supplies. I walked out of Mike and Sarah’s house with six bottles of water, three fresh cookies, six rolls of sweet tarts, and about 10,000 Tic-Tacs (both green and white). While the tic-tacs seem endless, the cookies didn’t make it to Dallas.
Therefore, I stopped at a supermarket and got some rolls, cheese, Windex, and, much to my delight, a huge box of Little Debbie Star Crunch snax for just $2.99. I had lived off these things during college. It had the highest calorie to dollar ratio (350 cals/$.25) of anything in the campus food shop. Those and multivitamins got me through sophomore year. I took it as a good omen, so I bought a box and took a picture.
I drove to Wichita Falls, Texas last night and got a cheap room in a cheap hotel. My plan is to get going early in the morning. Let’s see.
P.S. I cannot get the stupid map on the left of the page to work right. I think I’ll have to drop in a Google Map when I get the chance. [ed: Fixed as of August 1]
After 1600 some-odd miles of driving, I made it to Houston. Freindswood, actually. I was welcomed with open arms, and news that my godson was in for a nap. Perfect.
I didn’t update my blog during the trip as much as I wanted. Internet connections were available, but I was just too tired or anxious to get on the road. Two more things. I was also not sure about what was so interesting about a blast across the country, sounded pretty boring to me. I also had a hard time updating the pictures on the site in a reasonable amount of time. Spending an 1/2 hour every day uploading pictures and arranging files seemed like a waste of time. I’d like to get it to 15 minutes or so. Looks like some PERL programming is in order. I KNEW I got that college degree for something. I also want to pick up a phone with a reasonable cell-data connection. That way, I could update my blog while at a rest stop, or wherever the urge grabs me.
Lots of time to think, lots of time to figure out what I want to do next.
First thing I want to do is find a better GPS mapping program than DeLorme Streets 2005.
Here are my main complaints:
I’ll have to see how well the handheld version works.
All in all, it was a lot of fun, and not nearly so bad as it could have been. A book on CD got me through Sunday (James Patterson’s “4th of July”). I’ll have to play with Audible.com for more material.
Up an coming features on my blog site:
Bye for now!
As the song goes, “On The Road Again”. Other than the “again” part, I’m on the way to Houston, TX to visit my godson and his parents. Oh yeah, I’m 3 days behind schedule. But, like I kinda assumed, the schedule went out the window pretty fast.
Let me just say that it takes a LOT OF WORK to get rid of 30 years of accumulated CRAP. That’s for another entry.
It’s 8:00pm here in Yuma and it’s HOT – still 102 degrees out. It smells like sand and dust. I wonder what makes sand smell kinda like old gym socks? Maybe it is the thousands of creatures sweating over the last million years. It does get hot here. It did stop at the Algodones Dunes and snapped some shots. When I get to Houston, I’ll work on getting the picture album hooked up to the blog. ‘Till then, you’ll just have to wait.
1321 miles to go.
RSS Feed