Blogs from Ecuador, South America - page 15

A hectic few weeks gearing up for the Grand Re-Inauguration of the BIB, the volunteer children’s library where I’ve been helping out for over 10 years. In an effort to better utilize the facilities, we re-opened as the Centro Cultural Arte del Mundo (Art of the World Cultural Center) hosting more movies and theatre and offering more classes and workshops, in addition to the children’s library program (Biblioteca Interactiva de Baños) and the Secondhand Shop (BIB Bazar) that I run as a fundraiser. I spent quite a few days walking all over town asking restaurants to donate trays of food for our opening day celebration and hitting up business owners for prizes for our big raffle. I hadn’t realized how many people I’ve come to know fairly well over the years. Every single person I approached ... read more

Kirsten was complaining that we are do not get to sleep in at all on our trip. Today we were able to set the alarm for 7 am! For us, that was sleeping in. Chester was in bed last night early with her ear all jacked up, and Kirsten stayed up watching horrible television. We both still got plenty of sleep and were up and ready to go! Today was a travel day to another island after our morning excursion. That meant we needed to pack up everything before we left. Packing up everything didn’t mean the little lizard that was crawling around in Kristen’s suitcase before she finished packing. We definitely have some little creatures in our bags that are probably coming home with us. Jorge, our guide, picked us up at 8:30 for a ... read more

Waking up in paradise is always an eventful morning. We were up and ready to go by our 7:30 pick-up time for a day of snorkeling and hiking. As it always happens to us when we are in a big tour, we were the first ones picked up by the bus, with many stops after picking up 10 other people. The last group to get picked up were at least 15 minutes late to board the bus, and then when they finally showed up they were four hot, skinny bitches and one old lady. It just gave us more reason to hate the last group. At least in the Galapagos, we were able to limit our excursions to a smaller group of under 16 people We are too old and just can’t handle the large group ... read more

Another year and another trip for Kirsten and Chester, but with everything going on in our lives, we decided to stay in the western hemisphere and keep the trip a bit shorter than our normal vacations. Also because we couldn’t find more than 8 straight days with no one visiting us in Denver. With that being said, this did not mean we couldn’t check-off another bucket list item. We are heading to Galapagos Islands off Ecuador for 8 days. Our usual decision on destinations was a bit rushed and this was a bit of a last-minute selection, simply because we are running out of places Kirsten or Chester haven’t been. But this is one of those places neither one has visited. The days leading up to the trip were a bit hectic. Kirsten had to travel ... read more

Hello Blog Readers - thanks for being here! Some of you have been following my blog since I first began in 2006. Thanks, Madge, for insisting that I keep folks in the loop of my life in Ecuador. Here I am, twelve and a half years later with 145 published entries. I'm still at it...and you're still reading! To explain the title of this entry I need to tell you that the past month's activities and travels were overlaid on a backdrop of recovery from cataract surgery. There were complications and it's been a journey. My experiences during recuperation had me looking at the semantic and more esoteric connotations of the words SIGHT and VISION. Allow me to start by saying that, for my part, I am eternally grateful to the visionaries who had the foresight ... read more