Pocketful of Memory Cards

We've brought back some dud gifts for the kids from our trips, but I think we done good with this one.  Our son is a very talented musician and while in Venezuela we picked up a  Cuatro  for him, which we were able to deliver to him today.    A cuatro has only four strings and they are tuned like a ukelele, much different from a guitar which is his instrument of choice.  It amazes me how he can pick up an instrument, particularly stringed ones and with no instruction at all make it sound great.  And he he can't resist trying a little Ozzie. Check this out below to see a more traditional approach.  Very Cool!

We visited Salt Spring Island this weekend, to celebrate Reg's 94th birthday and to share the goodies we picked up in Venezuela.  Unfortunately we couldn't bring back any food, but we were able to snag a few cans of Polar , (pronounced poh-LAR)  the beer they used to enjoy and we bought a couple of bottles of Cacique (cah-SEE-kay), the coveted rum.   Here's Mike and his brother Bob enjoying the Polar, but I'm told it doesn't taste quite the same.  They feel it's due to the fact that in the old days the cans were steel and the current aluminum cans affect the flavour.

I've been keen to take a photo of my husband in the football jersey he bought while we were on vacation in Venezuela last month.  It's the jersey of the favourite football team of his youth, Venezuela's Vinotinto or "The Burgundy" and appropriately he's sporting it for his last soccer game of the season.   It's not often I can get him to pose without sticking his tongue out,  or his chest, making some sort of face, or mooning me.   Sometimes I think he's the poster boy for the adage "Growing old doesn't have to mean growing up", except he doesn't seem to be growing old either. I must admit there's something appealing about a fifty year old man still very much in touch with the little boy inside. Sure, there are times when I'm not in the mood for childish behaviour, but in truth those are the times when childish behaviour is just what I need. Sometimes I take myself a little too seriously and when I do I...

Lori-Anne of The Pear Tree recently introduced me to a  neat site called " Dear Photograph ".  People use their old photographs and take a shot of them within the original setting circa now.  After surfing the site,  I thought it would be fun to try to take one or two when we went to Venezuela as we'd be visiting some locations my husband would have photos from, from the 60s and 70s.  Unfortunately I couldn't find his photo albums before we went away.  This morning however, I did come across a small black and white photo taken on a family trip to Canaima, sometime in the mid 60's I would think. Here's my attempt to turn it into a "Dear Photograph" after the fact by holding the old photo infront of my lap top with the new photo as the wallpaper.  Here's a better version of the recent photo.

As tradition seems to dictate, our first night back from vacation leads to a dinner inspired by the cuisine of our favourite restaurant on the trip.  Tonight's dinner is inspired by the chefs at  Posada Movida on Los Roques. A simple pizza, some mild Italian sausages from Valoroso, our local Italian grocer, and an Ensalada Mixta; mescalun, big chunks of tomato and avacado and sliced red onions. Wish we could get the avacados we had on Margarita.  One lasted us two weeks.

I am not ready to leave.  Last year, when we left Tahiti after two weeks, I was more than ready to leave.  I would have left earlier, as beautiful and charming as it was.   We were talking to a tour operator on the beach this morning after we'd taken our final stroll along Playa Del Agua and I felt a sudden pang in my chest at the thought of not being able to spend the day under a beach umbrella with a "coca-lite" clutched in my hand and a paperback flipped open in my lap. I think it has to do with the people.  Many of the homes and business are run down and sometimes it's frustrating to see the garbage lining the roads and piled up on the beaches. It's frustrating to see because Venezuela is such a rich country but the current government doesn't want to pass the wealth on to the people. It's a complicated situation that you can't really make clear in a brief blog, but despite this, there's something about the friendliness of the Venezuelans...

For a while I was beginning to think our trip to Venezuela was more like a tour of airports than a vacation.  From the time we arrived on January 17th, until we landed in Porlamar Margarita this afternoon, we'd been on eleven different flights.  I can't say eleven different planes because we took the same plane with Angel for three different flights.   It's been a lot of air time and a lot of time waiting in airports, but when I look back on the photos I've posted here over the past two weeks, it's been a pretty amazing trip.  I'm grateful to my husband for his planning, his patience, and his translation skills. There's still two flight left to get us back to our home sweet home, but I think it's been worth it. The airport in Porlamar A plane coming towards the runway at Los Roques Coming in for a landing at Ciudad Bolívar Airport  Landing at the Canaima Airport - this was the only one that made me feel nervous. Arriving ...

When we made our plans to visit Venezuela for my husband's fiftieth birthday we had no intention of returning to El Pao, the small American camp  where he grew up.  We were discouraged from visiting by a number of people, particularly my father-in-law.  "You can't go home again," he quoted.  He insisted my husband would find it depressing and would regret it. When we met up with Cesar, my husband's childhood friend, he suggest we go to El Pao on our last day in Puerto Ordaz.  It was less than an hour's drive away and afterwards we could have lunch in San Felix, visit Llovizna Falls on the Caroni River (the river my niece was named after) as well as the nearby Dam and Museum.  "We'll bring a towel for Mikey," he said. Cesar and my husband infront of the house he grew up in. The mine where his father worked has grown over considerably The school is one of the few things that has been maintained over the years.  The town was ...

When Pixar made the movie " Up " the animators could have drawn anything they wanted to represent  Paradise Falls and the Lost World that Carl, the grouchy protagonist, longed to visit.  Instead they used Canaima National Park as their source, a 3,500,000 hectare, beautiful lush jungle with amazing waterfalls, and giant mesas or tepuis , located in a south east corner of Venezuela. We had hoped to visit Canaima when we started making plans for our vacation.  We just couldn't seem to make it work and had given up on it by the time we left.  When we arrived in Puerto Ordaz to visit my husband's friend Cesar, he informed us he had a pilot friend aptly named Angel, who would see to it that we got a chance to visit one of the most beautiful places in Venezuela, if not the world, and stay at the best lodge in the park. I have to say I felt like a VIP as Angel met us at the entrance to the airport looking quite dashing in his uniform and dark aviator glasses....

You always hear about "island time" when you go to the Caribbean.  People complain about having to wait in line for things, flights are often delayed, and stores never open on time. After ten days of our vacation which included five very smooth flights on and off two islands, we hadn't experienced anything like that... until today.  Our preferred breakfast place seemed closed for the day, the internet cafe wouldn't be open for several hours and we visited three different travel agents, returning to two of them because "[they'd] be back soon", before we could find one where there was someone who could book us on a flight to Puerto Ordaz on the mainland...the place where my husband would meet up with his childhood best friend.   Our original flights were no longer available and our plans to leave tomorrow and return Sunday evening were thrown out the window.  (For some reason my husband didn't think we'd have any trouble booking the day befor...

When we got up this morning at 7 a.m. it was pouring rain and at 7:50 when our ride didn't show up, we figured our trip to Coche Island on the catamaran Mamale had been cancelled.  We poured ourselves another cuppa and sat on the deck, planning to head into town around 8:30 to pick up our refund. Despite the downpour, we heard a honk at 8:30 and rushed out the front door to join our fellow tourists for the hour drive to the marina.  It poured all the way there but stopped when we got off the bus.  It was still very grey but by the time we got a few miles from shore the skies were blue and we were slathering on the sunscreen. Our crew kept us well entertained and lubricated with lots of rum punch.  There are a number of incriminating photos of hubby and I doing our turn dancing with various head gear.  They are truly awful.  They are so bad I want to post them so you can see just how bad they are, but they are truly bad!  We stopp...