The 7th Year! The adventure has begin.
I suddenly realize that this Cancun 2024 is devoid of images! I have done the work to get the images to my computer but have nt uploaded them and places the on these pages. Have to stop the train of though writing that I love and put in a little eye candy!
I need to come up with some “censored” pictures to go along with this section. Today, Friday, Jan 12 was not a completely typical day but a good one to talk about for the purposes of this topic. I sweat through my clothes at least 3 times a day. First there is the ride. Of course I come back with sweat drenched under ware, socks, riding shorts and riding top. Hang them up. Wash them as regularly as I can. Today, I got back from my ride about 10:15 and wanted to race off to the bank before leaving for lunch. I kept on the bottom outfit but put on a t-shirt instead of my riding top. When I return from the bank, it was drenched and had to be hung up. Now it is past time to get dressed for lunch. I can cheat a little bit here and ware my bathing suit and today a new t-shirt, a beer one. At 3pm I am back drenched again. Hang up the socks, bathing suit and t-shirt. At 5pm I am ready for dinner. This time under ware, shorts, socks and Hawaiian shirt. Back at 8pm, all drenched,
As the yet to be taken picture will show, the room is just littered with cloths drying from every corner. I have a heat pump? type air conditioner that keeps the room as cool as I want and I have a large fan. I keep them going when I am home but turn them off when I am out and at night. Things don’t always get washed. Infact, wearing something that has just been washed is the exception. Usually the criterion is that it is dry. As of today, I have about 3 Hawaiian shirts, 1 dress shirt, 2 pairs of under ware and socks that are still clean from NH. They are kept in reserve! The exit strategy is to just put on the last clean items as I move out for the airport! I brought things like long riding pants, heavy fleece and dress pants that I probably will never wear but that really is the good news. It means the weather has been so nice that I have not had to go deeper into those reserves. Other years I have!
Change in topic, It rained last night, Saturday, 1/13. I had long gotten home from Indian restaurant and was asleep and did not look at the clock but say 3AM. It is now 8:30AM. I have been on the computer for about an hour, moving money to pay bills and planning my March 13-25 trip to Claremont California. I have to get that trip locked in before I schedule March 30 – April 15 Portugal bike riding trip that proceeds daughter’s wedding in Boston April 20th! It is a hard life but someone has to live it! Might as well be this 77 year old!. My wonderful wife makes a little noise about this running around. Especially when I am away for a foot of snow, one of the cars has a dead battery, the door has fallen off the mail box, etc.
I did have a little coup yesterday. Kim is not a big bird watcher. She definitely gives it a try but is not very interested in telling small brown birds apart. She is interested in 3 foot pink ones with yellow feathers. I have not seen her November 2023 african Safari pictures yet but hope to see some birds in that. Kim’s woman cave in our house is a first floor library room with windows right on the front of the house and facing a horse farm across the street, Yesterday morning about 9am Kim called me in Cancun to report a strange white bird grazing with the normal Canadian Geese in the horse field. It was raining! She graciously consented to going out and taking pictures to send me. Her phone call actually started out asking me what I know about where to report strange bird sightings along the NH coast. 10 minutes later she posted the pictures and reported that she really had to run off to attend to daughter wedding projects.
The pictures were pretty poor quality. I’m not sure if that was a result of the rain or just Kim not using the zoom well on her high end cell phone. I started texting people. Cousin in Lewiston Maine is a serious birder but I could not rouse him and even tried his wife with no replies. Strangely, I could not find a cell number for the contractor in Boothbay Harbor Maine who maintains our summer hoe but I did have his father’s. Father Bob is a serious birder and I texted him along with a biking friend who not only does birds but all of nature.
Father Bob got back to me first and I, after A LOT of poking and swiping managed to send him one of Kim’s blurry images. I’ll include it here as soon as I master that small technical feat! Biking friend also got back to me and I forwarded her the same image. Father Bob took at guess with Snow Goose and biking friend agreed. I sent that info onto Kim.
As you may have forgotten, all of the above is just a side track from Sunday morning at home because of rain. There is actually blue sky now at 9am but my analysis of the red tiles on the walk outside says that they still have at least a little slick water film in paces and riding is dangerous enough without adding that in. So, a morning off from riding. I would normally go out at 8am. Todays plans called for heading out toward Porto Morallas. I would only go about 8K of the 40K trip, just enough for a little exercise. I only have 3 routes that I rotate through. his actually is my second or maybe third non-riding day! I took Thursday 1/4 off, I had not even picked up the rental bike! I am also pretty sure that I took Sunday 1/7 with NO rain off. I’ll have to check the records!
As I said, it is 9am. I don’t have to leave for lunch until 11am! My great success of the morning was making progress on the Claremont California reservations. I started this task about a week ago but could not pull the trigger mainly because of the flight times Kayak was offering. My older daughter is in Claremont and we are scheduled to be there for son’s 4th birthday Match 22. They are very firm about requesting us to use Ontario California airport, which is the nearest to them. I have occasionally be able to use Burbank as long as I coordinate it with Kevin, our son-in-law’s work schedule as he commutes to that area. I used to have a Jet Blue? non-stop BOS to Burbank but it is a casuality of Covid.
Anyway, Kayak is offering 7:30 AM flights out and red eyes back. Neither of which I want to do. The 7AMs require getting to a NH bus at like 4am and I don’t need to explain the unattractiveness of red eyes. And all of these are one stops where as I am severally addicted to non-stop. There is enough trauma in life getting to one airplane, how can one add in the possibility of needing to be lucky a second time. And this in a era where airlines like to send you an email saying, oh, that flight you scheduled, we moved it a few hours one way or the other.
So, after a few days and one last morning of research, I think I am ready to bite the bullet and go around Kayak. I actually worked with the people who founded it! They were a team of about 6 programmers and managers. They began with Paul English at Fidelity, did a start up hosting games on the web, were acquired by Intuit, where I joined them and then went onto found Kayak. I would be a lot richer if I had been able to catch that train!!
It is 9:30 and I have not started breakfast! Got all the old seedless grapes out of the frig, two different purchases. I was glade to see that I could use my normal “smaller batch” purchase method here in cancun. I never like to take the, what seems to me, a large bag that the groceries put the grapes out in. I like to get a plastic bag from the dispenser and just pick a few bunches. Since they are selling them by weight, they do not seem to care, though they do suffer some having to identify the grapes and enter the code instead of just scanning the bag. I don’t wash them, kind of like my body. Put it on self maintenance. If I get sick, I will adjust my behavior but so far so good. One of my favorite habits in this mode is survival of the fittest gardening. My peas and tomatoes have to outgrow the weeds to get to the sun. I am not spending my time papering them.
What I did was get a reasonable non-redeye return from Burbank into BOS. It is a little expensive, like $400. I can take an Uber to get to it so as not to inconvenience the family. Now I have to get out there. There are so many non-stops to LAX from BOS. I use a lot of Delta, so I found a $200 with them. The missing link is getting to Claremont from LAX after a 7PM landing, I have a vague memory of being at LAX. Maybe even of daughter Emily picking me up. Certainly also a memory of riding the train from LAX somewhere. I used to travel fairly regularly on business and I have been riding my bike regularly in March in CA so maybe on one of those pre-Ontario trips.
So I spent the morning working all the searches of how to get from LAX to Claremont. There is a nice train into Claremont and it seems to leave Union Station at least once an hour in the 8-9pm time frame. Again, complete search of how to get from LAX to Union Station. Even reading about more than one Metro line but finally seem to have settled on a 1 hour fly away bus that seems to leave LAX for Union every 30 minutes. I’ll have to look one more time to be sure I have a plan B if my 7pm landing does not get me to the 9:30 train! And of course it would be nice if I actually purchased these tickets instead of just being confident that I have a plan in my mind!!
New day, new thoughts. I’ll get back and clean up the above, probably move a lot of it to their own pages and of course add images! This is the last day, the last hours. It is January 18, Thursday, 11am. I am all packed. The flight is at 3:30pm. I had an idea of taking the luggage to the bike shop and spending a couple hours riding the buses before going to the airport. But Alexandra’s message on airbnb said I did not have to be out until noon so I have just been sitting here typing. I have made a few small changes in the luggage arrangement. I packed the heavy Timberline rain boats and will wear the newly dried hiking shoes. I managed to squish the fleece into the suitcase along with the jeanes so I will be a little lightly dressed on the plane in shorts etc.
I will have a fair amount of time at Terminal 3 in Cancun. They usually have a nice sushi bar for me. I have spent a LOT of time in that terminal. One year they even canceled the flight due to weather and Kim was able to get me a flight into NYC and one on to Boston, though it was the famous night where the airport was shut down and C&J had stopped running and I got to spend the night at Logan! I was very proud of the accomplishment for an old man.