John was still moving a bit slowly and still in his full leg brace on our next adventure with Roger and Peg. In December we went as far to the south as we could without leaving US territory by going to St. Thomas in the US Virgin Islands. Recall that there were still somewhat scary quarantine restrictions on getting back into the US in December 2021.
We reconnected with the Colorado side of John’s family in October, albeit for the sad occasion of Gloria’s funeral. Gloria was the last surviving member of that generation in the family. But it was otherwise a great reunion of John’s cousins on his father’s side. And the Fall weather in Colorado Springs was magnificent.
In June, we extended the reach of our travels by heading out west to San Francisco with Roger and Peg and planned to then go hiking on the California Coast trail and in Mendocino wine country with Danielle who flew up from San Diego. Things did not go entirely as planned.
The first few days in San Francisco were great. We walked 10-12 miles each day on the hills of San Francisco and on Alcatraz Island. We also got to see John’s California cousin Kathy and her husband Roy.
But apparently, we had a bit too much fun and exercise for folks our age. On day 3 John fell on a step and significantly injured his right leg. Not realizing the extent of the damage and thinking it might be just a muscle pull, we continued the trip with John hobbling around but not keeping up very well. Danielle drove us up to Mendocino and John was able to take some great pictures. It wasn’t until we got back home that it was discovered that John had severed three quadriceps tendons and needed a quadriceps rebuild, which was delayed until August due to a Covid code black emergency at Orlando hospitals. Other than that it was a pretty good trip.
After 12 months of relative isolation, we got our vaccinations in January and felt safe enough to venture out in late February on our first non-family travel venture since Covid began. We drove to Key West to meet Roger and Peg, stopping on the way to see Lee and Bill at their place in Rotunda West. We stayed at a quaint boutique hotel right on Duval Street and did a lot of walking around the town, viewing sunsets and visiting sights like the Hemingway House, Truman’s Little White House, a butterfly encounter, a lighthouse and a rum distillery that had converted its process to make hand sanitizer to overcome a shortage during the pandemic. Seems that there is a lot of similarity between rum and hand sanitizer!
In mid-February we flew to Amman, Jordan to begin a two week travel through time in Jordan and Egypt. Achmad, our tour guide in Jordan introduced us to our driver Hossain and his Time Machine (bus). Sites visited ranged in time from 3000 BC in Egypt to 2035 AD in Jordan.
In January, we flew to San Diego to spend time with Danielle. She had arranged for us to travel La Paz, Mexico, which turned out to be a wonderful way to reinforce our increasingly positive impressions of Mexico. She is only 20 minutes from the border and flights from San Diego to La Paz were very expensive. So we Lyft-ed to the border and walked across a bridge that went directly into the Tijuana airport. From there it was a 2 hour flight south to La Paz which is near the tip of Baja California Sur.
Danielle texted us before the trip and asked if we would be comfortable swimming with whale sharks and sea lions. John replied with a question: “what do they eat?”. Danielle’s response was: whale sharks are vegetarians, not sure about sea lions”. We did it anyway and it was fun.
In 2019 we made our third visit to Australia, and each time it has been a great trip. We have now experienced three distinctly different and very interesting regions. We ran a conference in Brisbane and then flew to the very center of the country (called the Red Centre) to experience the world’s most famous rock: Uluru (formerly Ayers Rock) and Kata Tjuta, both sacred to Aboriginal people, and then visited the very remote outback town of Alice Springs.
Brisbane is a lovely town, very modern but with a heritage dating back to the 1820’s when it began as a British penal colony. England had a problem with overcrowding of jails and the loss of American colonies in the War of Independence led the English to establish a penal colony in the new land of Australia. A central feature of Brisbane is the river, with fleets of water taxis that are heavily used by commuters. We spent a week getting to know Brisbane.
Our rental car license plate
After that, we took a 3 hour plane ride to the center of the country deep into the Outback. We landed in a dust storm and the rental car agent told us to watch out for the wild camels: The dust storm had caused them to get closer to the roads and “They don’t know what they are doing!” Apparently the British brought camels from Afghanistan 150 years ago to help explore the interior and these were the descendants of those that escaped. We were disappointed that we didn’t see one, but the weather cleared up nicely that afternoon
Sunset dinner on Tali Waru dune, with Uluru in the background.
We did a sunset dinner with local entertainment and local food, having driven out to the dunes in a monstrous all-terrain vehicle. The sunset was spectacular and an astronomer then gave us a guided tour of the Southern Hemisphere constellations.
Gourmet dinner on the dune, sampling lots of local food, including ants – a great source of protein
The classic view of Uluru (Ayers Rock)
Uluru, the world’s largest monolith, was “discovered” in 1873 by Europeans but the local Anangu people had already been there at least 22,000 years. Long called Ayers Rock, it was returned to its Aboriginal owners in 1985 and reassumed its original name. It was named as a World Heritage site in 1987.
Alice Springs Telegraph Station – World-Changing Technology: The Electric Telegraph
Deep in the center of Australia we discovered technologies significant to both John and Paula. John’s was the Overland Telegraph Line (OTL) completed in 1872 by the British-Australian Telegraph Company, which was the last link connecting the underwater telegraph cable from Singapore and Indonesia to the cities in south Australia and considered one of the great engineering achievements of the 19th Century. It reduced the time to get a message to or from London from many months to 24 hours by use of multiple repeater stations along the way. Alice Springs was created as one of those repeater stations.
Paula’s technology: Royal Flying Doctors Service
Another attraction in Alice Springs is the headquarters of the Royal Flying Doctors Service, established in 1928 to bring basic medical services to the remote areas of the Outback. That technology was a bit more interesting to Paula.
Hiking at Standley Chasm in the West MacDonnell mountain range.
We added a new country in 2019, when we circumnavigated Iceland on the small French cruise ship Le Boréal, with Kathy, Roy, Roger and Peg. It was an active Backroads tour, arriving in a new port each day and lots of hiking to waterfalls, hot springs, mud pots, hydro and geothermal power plants, volcanoes, etc. We also added to our list of latitude parallels by hiking to the Artic Circle on Grimsey Island.
We visited Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia again this year to conduct a conference.
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In November we spent almost three weeks in Southeast Asia, touring Vietnam and Cambodia. One week was spent on a riverboat cruising up the Mekong River from Ho Chi Minh City (former Saigon) to Phnom Penh with many stops in … Continue reading
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