01 Saturday Nov 2014
If you’ve been following Tom’s new blog, the Foolish Flyer, you know that we spent last weekend in and around Lake Chelan in Central Washington State. Tom’s mission was the North Wing flying toy factory; mine was exploring new places.
20 Wednesday Aug 2014
Posted in Accommodations, Gallery, Travel
“Here’s your Loonie, and here’s your Toonie,” Keith said, by way of greeting at the Vancouver train station, plopping coins into our hands. (A loonie is worth one dollar Canadian—it has a carving of a common loon on it—and a toonie is worth two.) He was providing us with a small budget for our weekend in Vancouver, British Columbia. (Yes, the travel bug has hit again!)
13 Tuesday May 2014
Posted in Accommodations, Gallery
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Living room and guard sheep
A bed. Two bedside tables. A pot rack. Two dressers (man am I sick of making drawers!). A dining-room table. Four chairs for the dining-room table. Two stools for the kitchen counter. A metal rack that we call “the appliance garage.” A monolithic wardrobe. Two office chairs. Two office desks (and more chairs—man am I sick of assembling chairs). A TV stand and a tall shelf. Six lamps and a convertible couch.
That’s what we built during the past two weeks. Yesterday the living-room furniture arrived. Blissfully, it was assembled. (That’s it above.)
26 Wednesday Mar 2014
There are all sorts of houses in Puerto Vallarta, from dirt-poor shacks to glamorous, sprawling sea-view mansions. We are all curious about how people live, especially the wealthy. What would life be like with a lot of rooms and a big staff and a perfect kitchen?
21 Friday Mar 2014
Posted in Accommodations, Gallery, Travel
Credit: Wikimedia Commons
The Angel of Independence — Mexico City’s iconic centennial monument — was just four blocks down the street from our hotel. I was astonished to find that the twenty-three stairs surrounding the base were added long after the statue was built. It seemed that El Ángel had actually risen from the earth some fifteen feet since she was built. She hasn’t. Mexico City has sunk around her.
11 Tuesday Mar 2014
“Today we will visit a bakery.”
That was Vicky, our tour guide. To be fair, I’m as much a lover of chouquettes and panettones as the next guy, but we had committed five of our precious remaining expat days, and paid big money for airline tickets, hotels, and the tour itself — and now Vicky is dragging us to a bakery. This was Mexico City, the largest metropolitan area in the Western Hemisphere! What happened to Aztek ruins, Mesoamerican pyramids, Diego Rivera murals?
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05 Wednesday Mar 2014
Julia is small, maybe five feet, and a spry seventy-something — the perfect candidate for a Charlie Chaplin costume. The day she penguin-walked into our living room the applause was loud enough for the neighbors to hear. Continue reading
15 Wednesday Jan 2014
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“I have been authorized to offer you the villa next year at the same price.”
That was Brissa, our real estate agent. We told you about her in an earlier post. She was the miracle worker who found our home in Puerto Vallarta and made it available for six months this year.
And now, as it turns out, next year too, for we paid our deposit two days ago. We will return to Puerto Vallarta and our Los Tules villa in January, here to stay for another two months in the winter of 2015.
24 Tuesday Dec 2013
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Downtown Portland in gingerbread
Max, the light rail train, was waiting for us inside the airport. The fare was a dollar. It took us downtown, within two blocks of our hotel. We had arrived for Christmas in Portland.
19 Thursday Dec 2013
To prove what a great husband he is, Tom booked us on a tour to Guadalajara, the second largest city in Mexico. It wasn’t just any tour, though, it was a shopping tour, and I saw more different kinds of stimulating marketplaces in three days than ever in my long life as a black-belt agoraphiliac.
The Expat Almanac 