Adventure of the month

the midst of my manic home renovation projects, a ridiculously sweet opportunity fell square into my lap, wholly unbidden.  How would I like to go to San Juan, Puerto Rico for a couple of days?  Oh, and it would be during the weekend before my birthday.  How's about I bring along some friends?  For free.  Yup, this happened. Times like this, you have to realize that life does not suck. Although Puerto Rico is a scant two hour flight from Miami, I had previously never had a chance to fully explore this Caribbean island.  Joined by four of the funnest people you could ever travel with, Ivon, Jorge, Lily and Israel, I was able to right this egregious wrong.

I know. I know. I have been really slacking off on this here blog.  I chose a blog title that would force me to post at least once a month and yet for the past four months, this site has sat woefully abandoned and ignored.  By way of excuses, I will say that earlier this year I became a homeowner for the first time.  As a result, my adventures have lately consisted more in choosing which loud primary colors to use for my walls (correct answer: all of them) and figuring out why my kitchen tile has developed such an explosive temperament (google 'tile tenting'- it is a thing), than my usual galavanting around. But this does not mean I have become a sedentary being.  Far from it.  Another reason for my absence, has been a hectically busy work schedule, one that has taken me on a number of  journeys to places both new and familiar.  Among those stops, way back in May, was an extended stay in one of those familiar places, Kaiserslaut...

Salem could easily have been one of the many nondescript Boston suburbs. They are plenty of them, many of them with some tangential tie to America's revolutionary era or historically interesting architecture, but I personally can not muster enough enthusiasm to pay them a visit.  Where Salem distinguished itself was by giving itself fully up to religious lunacy in 1692. This was not just the usual topical, fire and brimstone variety of god-inspired cray-cray. The Salemites went all out. In the midst of an perennially-feuding village, a new minister who had the questionable distinction of having failed at all prior vocational endeavors, managed to unite everyone in a massive game of "Find the Witch".

You ever get that feeling that you have seen everything there is to see in a particular destination? Perhaps you have been there a number of times or maybe the last time you were there, you were particularly active on the sightseeing front. For whatever reason, finding new ways to fill a day have become increasingly difficult. Los Angeles is one of those places for me. It is a city that I really enjoy and always look forward to visiting, but a recent 5 day stay had me scrambling to find new things to add to my itinerary (as opposed to just repeating the same old haunts from prior visits). Some googling led me to a place I think I may have visited as a child, but since clearly I don’t have a whole lot of recall on the matter, I decided to treat it as something new. It was in this quest for novelty that I planned an outing to the La Brea Tar Pits.

The NY Times travel section has a regular feature wherein they pick a destination and then tell you what you could do there within a 36 hour period. Of course, they neglect to mention that you would need to have a late model hovercraft to actually complete their itinerary in the allotted time frame. Either that or you must be willing to zip through a museum as if there was a prize to be collected at the gift shop, Amazing Race-style or limit yourself to no more than 30 minutes for a full sit-down meal (good luck with that in Europe). I, myself, am intimately familiar with the rushed visit. Oftentimes, through a confluence of unfortunate circumstances, I have extremely short stays in places that are worthy of much closer inspection. For a perfect example of this annoying phenomena, I only need to look back to the beginning of this month, when I spent a whopping 16 hours on the unspoiled island of Kauai.

Our last day in the Serengeti began exactly the way a last day in the Serengeti should, with a pair of giraffes calmly eating leaves right outside our tents. They were the perfect animal to wake up to.  Any of the smaller creatures would not have been nearly as exciting and none of the more carnivorous ones would have been quite as welcome. And speaking of flesh eaters, I mentioned to Olly, our tour leader, that once again I had not heard any lions during the night. I had, however, heard baboons left and right with their deep, guttural grunts sounding as if they were coming from pretty close by. Olly let me do my best baboon grunt impersonation a couple of times before explaining to me that baboons make no such noise. Those were, in fact, lions. I, the viewer of many MGM films, disputed this assertion and even threw in some inspired roaring noises by way of persuasive argument. Well, it turns out that those impressive roars are only one note in the lion repertoire, used mai...

You know you are camping in an unusual campsite when the morning discussion goes something like this- Everyone else: "Did you hear the lions last night?" Me: "No! I missed lions?! All I heard were frogs and hyenas. Oh, and baboons. I heard a lot of baboons." The others: "Yes. There were definitely lions. And the group over there thinks they saw a cheetah in the campsite." Me: "Balls!" We were camping inside of the Serengeti National Park and unlike other predator-inhabited game parks I'd been to, there is no fence separating us and the more ardently carnivorous mammals. How this works is still a bit of mystery to me. We were told not to worry, that we're not appealing to them since we generally don't yield a lot of meat, particularly when compared to a buffalo or wildebeest, which is true. But I'm pretty sure I have a good 20-30 pounds on an impala and they're called the 'McDonald's of Africa' by vir...