A Christmas miracle

Back in Florida for Christmas for the first time in I can’t remember. It’s definitely warmer than in our nation’s capital, but it’s still chilly, especially in the mornings. My motivation for 10k steps daily has waned a bit because mornings are 38 degrees. Since I do not have a lovely gym right across from me and am reduced to pounding pavement, there’s not a lot to encourage me to wake up and go. Especially since A. it doesn’t lead to weight loss and B. there’s nothing else to do all day anyway, so I can walk around the neighborhood later.

This chapter of No Place Like Home should be two months long; I’m not due back for language training until the end of February. I may have scheduled something earlier, but I honestly can’t tell from the schedule. There’s a two-hour class I have to do in a couple weeks, but beyond that, there’s nothing.

It’s all about Zippy. Yard work and massive home repairs are on the calendar as soon as 2024 hits and there’s also the matter of getting a new side view mirror because Zippy toasted the current one. It’s held up by a lot of tape and a prayer. This is no vacation.

I have a ton of leave to burn, though, and penciling it out, I will still have a bunch left over when it’s all said and done. It’s a little bit crazy, but it’s a nice crazy to have. Right now, I have three pots of leave and they all runneth over.

Anyway, Christmas at home is fine; Batgirl is happy to have another human to rub her tummy. We don’t do anything for the holiday, but I did get to a Christmas Eve service, which was nice. What’s not wonderful is having three people in the house and only two bathrooms; I’m having to share a tiny bathroom and I’m crammed into the third bedroom, which has little spare room. That’s bad because I have all my Sandbox furnishings – 400 pounds – with me. Much of it is in the garage and I’ve gifted Wendy some stuff I brought, but the rest has to hang somewhere. It’s household stuff, so I’m not using it, but it has to stay somewhere until it gets shipped to my next post, which won’t be until September.

It's crowded, so when I had the opportunity to cat sit for almost a week and have a whole bathroom – as well as Netflix and the whole house – to myself, I jumped. YAY! I spent Monday-Friday elsewhere, catching up on some movies, including the wonderful Christmas film “Love Actually.”

While there, I did try to walk a little. There’s a circle and I’d do that every morning, popping in a “Stuff You Should Know” podcast and throwing on headphones. Somehow, though, upon return, I can’t find the headphones anymore. It’s no great loss; they’re the wired ones that come with the phone, and the left one stopped working about three weeks ago. It’s a mysterious loss, though. It’s not here; it’s not there, but it has to be somewhere.

And now that I am back at No Place Like Home, I don’t have any headphones. Somewhere in the 400 pounds of stuff, there’s a wireless set but I have no clue where and don’t feel like digging. That wireless set is the third set of those I’ve bought. A cheap pair I got in Vilnius blew out and I left those on the free table. The first set was with me in Minsk. I remember one really cold morning (there were a lot of them) I went to the big grocery store and, in that no-man’s land between the first sliding door and the second one, the left one fell out!

Man, that was upsetting. I hunted and hunted for that thing; I mean, it couldn’t have gone far; it’s not like I didn’t notice it had fallen out. I got on my hands and knees and looked underneath ATM and vending machines – places no human eye (or hands) should ever encounter. But no dice.

Eventually, I bought a replacement off eBay but quickly discovered (quickly after the agonizingly slow delivery, anyway) it wasn’t exactly the same and was therefore not compatible. (Say mine was model 831 and the new one was 832.) Bummer. I went with the wired forever and then caved and bought the cheap ones in Vilnius. Pair No. 3, the one in a box somewhere, is corded together so I’m not worried about losing those, but I have to find them first.

While unpacking, I rooted through my backpack and felt something hard in this little bungie thingie on the strap. It’s for your MP3 player or something; I never use it. (My backpack dates to MP3 players.) I dug through the mesh to identify the object and it was my long-lost headphones! Truly a Christmas miracle.

Weirdly, I found the mismatched set in my 400 pounds of crap and reunited Lefty with Righty and tossed them in the charter together. A blue light blinked suspiciously, but Lefty charged up like a trouper.

That thing fell out of my ear well over two years ago and I hunted forever for it. The whole time, it was lodged in mesh maybe 8 inches from my ear

Discovering D.C.

Since I am in Washington temporarily, I’m trying to explore as much as possible. Still being acclimated to Sandbox winters, it’s a bit chilly for me but my goal is to do one touristy thing a weekend. Various Smithsonians are always good bets. There are so many of them!

The first weekend I was here, I went to the Air and Space Museum on the mall, which is being renovated. I’d been there before but love to wander. Another weekend, I went to the Native American one. After taking a week off of museums for Thanksgiving, I finally got to the larger Air and Space Museum branch, which is the Udvar-Hazy one near the airport. It was my third time trying to get there this stay and it was absolutely worth the wait.

It happened to be the 20^th anniversary of the museum, so it was packed. I arrived right before it opened and the line was at least a block long, but once it opened everyone went through quickly.

Holy cow, what an incredible place. It’s in a series of hangars and whoever did the planning must be some kind of Tetris wonder. There were scads of (mostly) winged aircraft, some of which were absolutely huge and some of which were nowhere near as large. Someone, way back when, must have done some blueprint or something and figured that you could fit this giant winged aircraft that took up a huge footprint and still have room to put other just-as-impressive (but smaller) aircraft, quite literally, in the wings. For example, there was an Air France Concord – which is one long beast – with multiple smaller aircraft strategically placed underneath. Other plans, gliders and balloon buckets hanging from the ceiling.

A lot of the aircraft were experimental and my big takeaway from that was that there are some really brave (or possibly stupid) in the world. Some of the prototype helicopters, in particular, reminded me of the thing that Barney Rubble tried to design on the very first Flinstones episode. The home-built planes and gliders were equally impressive.

The bombers and other wartime planes were amazing. One looked like a boat, and some absolutely looked like spy planes. Mostly because they were, like the Lockheed Blackbird, the epitome of “stealth.” My favorite bomber, though, as the “Flak-Bait,” which wasn’t on display. Instead, the Smithsonian folks had opened its workshop, so to speak, to visitors.

In the workshop, there are people cleaning, repairing and restoring potential exhibits. I’d caught a glimpse of the fuselage from the upstairs viewing room (it’s nor normally open to visitors, but the anniversary was special), and when I went through that hangar, stopped to look. There was an older gentleman standing on the other side of the “us and them” rope designating the walking path. I started talking to him about the plane and, since he seemed to know a lot about it, asked what his connection to it was. Turned out, his dad had been the pilot.

This is why it’s important to talk to strangers. They have amazing stories. The guy didn’t work at the Smithsonian, but had come to visit on the anniversary, and when the employees realized who he was, they asked him to step on the working side of the rope and chat with guests, and I just got lucky. He had some great stories about the bomber (a B26). I asked him how long his dad had flown it, and he said most tours were 25 missions long, but his dad flew 75. That’s incredible.

Since he said his dad, who’d been 22 when he served, didn’t talk much about the war, I asked when he figured out the enormity of what his dad had done. He said he’d had the opportunity to pilot a small plane in and out of the base where his dad had been stationed. (It’s no longer a base and is privately owned.) He said when he was coming in for a landing, he realized he was seeing the same countryside his father had seen 75 times.

I’m so glad I got to chat with him.

I had hoped to find the control panel that Laurie and her team signed after decommissioning the shuttle Discovery, but that is not on display. An employee explained that there’s another hangar for storage and only a small percentage of their stuff is on display.

That was a bummer, but seeing the Discovery made up for it. Holy cow, it is pretty cool to stand next to something that’s flown over 150 million miles. Well, I suppose it would bore Laurie, but it geeked me out. It is impossible, though, to get the whole thing in one photo frame.

I would up spending a couple more hours there than I figured, but it wasn’t enough time. I’d gone with someone and think that she got bored, so I caved and came back a little earlier than I had planned, but, even then, it was a good 3-4 hours. There’s just that much to see, and it’s totally worth it.

Now I am down to two more weekends in DC, although one of those is just a Saturday. I am thinking the American History museum will be next, although I checked the website and Seinfeld’s Puffy Shirt is not on display. Ford’s Theater is a backup, and so is seeing the White House Christmas tree.

If I go, I am going to ask how they store the things that aren’t on display. It sounds like there’s more in storage than on display. This makes me curious as to if there’s a giant storage unit somewhere with stuff all crammed in it, or if it’s something akin to the where the Ark of the Covenant was housed at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark.

 

Oh, to catch a ride

My American Express card (member since 1990!) expires at the end of this month. A couple months ago (or so it seems; time’s a bit wonky these days), I got a notice that they would be sending my new card so I gave them my address in The Sandbox. Unfortunately, it didn’t arrive before I left, and I don’t think leaving five days early had any impact on that.

Although I put in a forwarding notice from The Sandbox to Uh-mer-i-ka, it hadn’t arrived as of two weeks ago, so I changed my address back to where it was and requested a new card. It’s arrived but I’m not there, so the card is meeting me tomorrow. I have a backup credit card, so no worries, right?

Well.

I have a morning flight tomorrow and in checking the metro schedules, I discovered that they don’t start on the holidays until well after I need to be at the airport. There’s a bus, but it leave a tad too late, plus it takes 45 minutes to go four miles.

No worries, right? There’s an app for that, or so I hear. I discovered that Uber’s not great here, so I got Lyft and started setting up my account. After putting in my backup credit card, I was all set. Or so I though.

When I hit “confirm,” Lyft informed me that I needed to set another credit or debit card. Since my old AmEx wasn’t set to expire until the end of the month, I tried that. No dice. I have the new card number, but I didn’t have that secret code that they’re now adding to cards. My alternate card’s website has a thing where I can see a PDF of my card, so I tried that. Nope, it’s not there. AmEx has wonderful customer service, so I tried them. After finally convincing the AI customer service voice that I needed a real person, the real person said those numbers are secret and AmEx itself can’t see mine.

Any normal day, I’d love that safety measure, but not today. 

The Lyft app allowed for other types of payments, so I thought, what the heck, I’ll just hook it up to my PayPal. It took about five tries of endless spinning and restarting the app several times before I could access PayPal, but finally had success. Relieved, I again went to make a reservation, what since restarting the app killed the one I’d been trying to do. A payment method and a backup, right? What could go wrong?

Well, it didn’t take. The Lyft gods took me to the “we need another card” page. I tried again with the card, but it didn’t work. I restarted Lyft again, changing my primary payment method to cash, thinking that I’d have cash and a backup credit card. No dice.

At this point, I remembered I do have an AmEx card, even if it’s not in my possession. Instead, it was being transported at that very minute from Seminole Land to Disney Land. I called Zippy (she wasn’t driving) and, after the usual Zippy-trying-to-hear rigamarole, convinced her to put me on speaker so Barry, who acted as interpreter.

It was a long shot and didn’t pay off. All my mail – Zippy refuses to shred anything, instead collecting it for to go through every year or so – was in her suitcase. Since they’d been on the road for two hours already, I asked her to text me once she got to Disney Land (two words, not the theme park) and if I hadn’t solved the problem by then I’d get back with her.

There’s always a solution.

I searched for options and found a taxi company. The stupid internet site wouldn’t let me order a cab from it – no idea what happened – but I called the number. And it went straight to voice mail, except it said the mailbox was full.

Seriously, how hard could this be, right?

After wrestling with whether or not to just have the hotel call me a cab in the morning, I realized that I could just have them schedule it tonight. I pulled on my .90 Target ghost slippers (post-Halloween find; my feet were cold) and asked the front desk if they could do it for me. YES!

Oh my. The front desk associate (in training) managed to get it done in less than four minutes. It’s funny how just standing there while someone is accomplishing something that’s you’ve spent 20, 30 minutes on is such a relief. It’s sort of like your frustration increases and decreases at the same time.

But either way, I should have a cab to the airport tomorrow.

Happy Thanksgiving.

Kicked off the island

Once again, I’ve been “evacuated” from the 100-Acre Sandbox. It’s been unreal, but not at all unsafe. Even though the Middle East situation is volatile, at no point has anything been aimed at diplomats in the sandbox, so this evacuation/drawdown/whatever feels a little extreme.

The whole thing is unsettling, though. I had been preparing to leave a whopping six days later anyway, and being told one day that you’re leaving the day after instead of in a week (on a nonstop flight, no less) is jolting. I’d been trying to prepare anyway for a gap (my successor doesn’t have a visa yet) and kept getting pulled to other things, so there’s no real SOP on my job. I can work remotely, but as I’ve discovered, the two things I really need access to are inaccessible.

The travel to D.C. – where I was to be on Tuesday, 10/31 anyway – was miserable. It’s possibly the worst travel day I’ve ever experienced.

We checked out at 9 a.m., each with a 50-pound bag, a 20-pound carry-on and wearing or carrying out PPE, which is heavy as all get-out. After weighing the bags four times in five minutes on different scales (??), we were brought in groups to the place where we catch the helicopter to our Sister Sandbox at the airport. There, we waited for a flight to Amman. We have a little plane and they kept going back and forth with groups. I know a lot of people at the SS, so I chatted with them and had lunch in the cafeteria. Whitefish and spinach, not a bad way to end. (I’d had a burger, fries, carrots and ice cream for my last meal at the main Sandbox.)

My flight got to Amman at 6:30, and boarding for my onward (my routing was Doha – D.C.) was to be in an hour, so that wasn’t bad. I ran up to the lounge, grabbed some chicken and rice and went to the gate, where I met up with some other refugees.

By 7:27, there were still no gate agents around. Eventually, someone came but no one ever made any announcements. They never put any information up on the sign, but we pieced together (which is hard since any information was given in Arabic) that nothing was going to happen any time soon. At some point, I got a text from the airline – the only one in the group of 6-8 of us who did – that said there was “mechanical trouble” and we would receive an update by 10 p.m.

We never did, but by that time we’d figured out that the flight wouldn’t go and somehow we had to get our bags back ourselves. The whole planeload of people had to. We saw people leaving in large groups and followed them, grabbing an airline person and basically forcing him to speak to us in English about what was going on. He explained (or tried to) that we had to get our exit visas canceled and get our bags. Telling him we didn’t have exit visas didn’t seem to register to him.

Meanwhile, one in our group was contacting the travel agency and trying to get us re-routed, and, as we followed the group outside of security – meaning we’d have to go back through again – we found a gaggle of people clamoring for … we weren’t sure. There was no information desk, no nothing. In asking for information, we got a QR code “chat.” I tried it and never got a response.

In the throng of hysterical people, a customs (or something) agent grabbed my passport as I was trying to explain that I had no exit visa to cancel. He grabbed it, and many other people’s, and went into a room.

Picture a hunch of hungry refugees at a door where people occasionally surfaced to hand out bags of food to specific people. That’s what happened – some immigration people (I guess) were copying a couple hundred people’s passports and handing them back out, calling names 2-5 at a time. It was a nightmare.

By this time, my group had been confirmed on a different airline scheduled for 3:25, and at this point it was maybe 10 p.m. Someone told me to make a scene and demand mine, so I tried to, politely, pull the diplomat card. I told one guy I didn’t need an exit stamp, so grab my passport, it was the black one. (Another guy in our group had his taken at the same time I did and he got his back almost immediately.) Well, it didn’t work. I think he moved me back in the line.

Finally, the airline guy we grabbed helped prompt, probably using his penis. Since I don’t have one, apparently my voice doesn’t work either.

Anyway, we then had to exit through customs, getting stamped out, and claim our bags. For the diplomats in the group, this wasn’t a big deal since we have a short line and free visas. But the poor contractors on the flight had to cough up $60 for a visa, only to grab their bags and then go check in again.

Since our rebooked flight wasn’t scheduled to leave until 3:25 a.m., we couldn’t check in until 12:25, which meant we had to hang out in the crappy ticket area for about two hours. Finally, we got checked in and went through immigration/security for the second time and then headed up to the lounge for 2-3 hours – the flight was delayed until 4:20 a.m.

The lounge was nice and the whole thing was just so absurd. I went through the line to get food and I remember thinking, “Wow, this is exactly the same menu they had last time I was here.” And I realized “the last time I was here” had been 5-6 hours earlier. But we all got a table, got to know each other and talked, while some of us grabbed catnaps.

Finally, we went to the gate area, where we met up with a lot more refugees who had originally been scheduled for that flight. They looked fresh as daisies because upon arrival at 5-6 p.m., they took cabs into the city and checked into lovely hotels for a couple hours, showered, had decent meals and then set back out. We looked bedraggled and exhausted, but we all got on the flight to Frankfurt. I even got lucky and had an empty seat next to me.

Although that flight had some rough turbulence and we landed an hour late, we made it fine to the final flight. It was perfect. Although I cannot sleep on planes, I caught up on movies, watching the last Indiana Jones one (it tried too much), “No Hard Feelings,” “Are You There, God, It’s Me, Margaret” and “Guy Ritchie’s The Covenant.”

We landed and everyone dispersed, although we do have a WhatsApp group so, once we catch up on sleep, can get together and discuss the whole situation. It’s not something that people who haven’t been through it can relate to.

This morning, I woke up at 7 a.m. with a terrible migraine and I took a walk. I’m in Ballston and starting 10/31 I was going to be here anyway, so I got a hotel near where I will be then, since that other one wasn’t available today. I walked there this morning to figure out where it was and as I was nearing it, someone walked out who I thought looked familiar. I, not really loudly, called her name, assuming if it wasn’t hear she’d keep walking. But it was her! She’d been booted off the island a week before, in the first group and had landed there.

We took a long walk to Trader Joe’s and Target and just talked about the process. It’s just been unreal, especially since, so far, nothing that really screams “these people are unsafe, get them out of here.” We’re planning on dinner tonight and church tomorrow morning – there is one nearby.

Meanwhile, migraine gone, I came back to the hotel, took a long nap and woke up to the second quarter of FSU. I’m hoping to put this all behind me but it’ll take awhile. I’m still exhausted and the emotions are running.

But FSU is winning, so that is something.

Countdown is on

Well, it looks like I’m down to under 60 days in The 100-Acre Sandbox. Due to a personnel change, there’s going to be a gap when I leave and, since I could stay another month with only a marginal impact on my between-tour plans, I made the offer to remain here just a few more weeks but it didn’t work out.

Honestly, I’m not sure how I feel about that, although I tell myself I’m ambivalent. The truth is, there will be a lot of guilt involved because it will be a problem that I could have helped solve but it’s not my decision to allow me to do it. As a result, whatever I convey to my eventual replacement will be a game of telephone: I’ll leave instruction and teach as best I can someone who has absolutely no idea what my department is about, and that person will then have to convey it to someone else. It’s really not setting them up for success, which makes me sad. I worked really hard here but by the time the next person arrives it will be in tatters.

But this means I should return to Uh-mer-‘ka around the end of October, although I won’t head home for a couple months. A lucky stroke scheduling lets me leave on a direct flight to DC for training – no stopping in Amman for 14 hours and being crammed on a Royal Air Jordanian flight filled with families loaded to the hilt with luggage to Chicago or JFK and then Charlotte and Miami before getting home. Just straight from the Sandbox to our nation’s capital. The classes I need to take just happen to be offered the next week, so I get to break up almost a year of training with a couple months off – getting to spend the worst winter months in Florida and not DC.

But before I peace out of here, I’ve got another pickleball tournament to plan. We’re going pink for breast cancer awareness. In the weeks leading up to it, the big boss requested a pickleball clinic. Somehow this also fell to me, even though I’m not exactly a superstar. This past week has been a lot of pickleball. We – one other guy and I – decided to, instead of holding a big formal clinic, have one of the four courts available for lessons on the regular pickleball times. So three times this past week I’ve done “clinics,” although, to be honest, that’s basically what happens every Monday, Tuesday and Friday anyway. There are always new people and it’s usually me who gives pointers. In about 50 minutes, they’re better than me.

Although it’s noticeably cooler than when I left for Iceland, it’s still in the triple digits. Essentially, it’s gone from being 117 to 107, and there’s little shade on our pickleball courts. It’s quite toasty. Today, not a clinic day, I and the other guy decided to just got out and play, so it was two of us for 45 minutes and then another person heard the POP POP and came out for another half hour, then, as I was trying to leave, someone else came by and we played one game of four before I finally bailed. I sweat buckets and had to shower before church!

Looking at the sports and social calendar, I have spin class, pickleball and water aerobics plus two or three 5k run/walks before I leave. This will give me at least three more T-shirts from Sandbox events, and I have decided to make a quilt (meaning pay someone to make me a quilt) from all my event T-shirts. This morning, as I was cooling off between my post-pickleball shower and church, I hacked apart a total of nine T-shirts I had set to take back for a quilt. I have plenty more– I think I counted 12, and I am pretty sure I brought some home already – but figured why not lighten my load? This also means I’m committing to the quilt.

Now I am trying to buckle down and get everything done in this under-60-day period. My R&Rs are over and the next thing to look forward to is a really crappy flight, but at least it’s a nonstop really crappy flight. 

I will miss R&Rs from here. The normal time we take is something like a solid three weeks off, and that is not my usual travel method. It’s nice to be forced to do so. This last one was centered around Iceland and that was wonderful, but since my flight stopped in Vienna, I took a couple days there and went to Bratislava, then spent one day in Vienna before returning. Unfortunately for the Vienna part, I had a nasty cold by that time, but I took a walk and found a cool amusement park and took a bunch of pictures. Enjoy.  

If there’s a long hallway, I’m at the end of it

Greetings from Iceland, which is a bit cooler than The Sandbox, for sure! However, panicking led to overpacking for my eight-day tour around the island. I brought my Minsk overpants for a “glacier hike” that was maybe five minutes and my heavy parka, which has served for excellent filler space in the giant roller bag that  I loaded up. No real regrets on the latter, though, because I couldn’t fit everything in the carry-on anyway and would have still had to take the larger bag.

The “hike” was a bit of a letdown; he only other glacier hikes I’ve done, I’ve gone in from the top and been left by a helicopter. This one was from the bottom, and the longest part of the hike was the trek from the bus to the bottom of the glacier. We then walked by a well-beaten trail of glacier, but the kind of glacier that’s completely brown and looks like cold dirt rather than snow that’s buried in dirt. When we got to the white part – or at least the part with way more snow than dirt – we were only there maybe 5-10 minutes and never took any trails or anything before doubling back. I wasn’t disappointed, per say, but others in my tour group were. Today I discovered the tour company refunded us $30 for the hike, which was nice of them.

Overall, the tour was excellent, but I knew going in it was a “highlight hitter” tour and wouldn’t be anything in-depth. Every place we stopped, I could have spent six hours just getting lost. The landscape is so harsh, different and beautiful that I wanted to just hike and wander. There are lush fields and acres upon acres of barren wasteland that run into each other. At one point, we looked like we were on the surface of Mars and five minutes later saw sheep grazing on green grass.

The lava fields were beautiful to me, all covered in moss with tiny flowers. So were the craters of the volcanos. At one point, we drove through the crater of an extinct volcano and found gorgeous lakes. Oh, and waterfalls – they are everywhere, and each one is just phenomenal. I could watch a waterfall all day.

But if you ask me the name of any particular one I saw, I have not a clue. Icelandic is a tough language to grasp and most of the names are extremely long. My takeaways were that “Vik” is the shortest city name in Iceland and “—foss” means waterfall. So it might have been Snellenfoss or something similar, mostly with letters that do not appear in English.

The black sand beaches were fantastic. One had black powdery sand and another had sand plus “diamonds” – huge chunks of glacier ice that pooled in a lake that, from the air, looked like ice cube soup. (I saw drone footage.) Occasionally, a chunk would calve off and float to the Atlantic, where it would then get washed up on the shore, getting beaten regularly by waves in the most mesmerizing fashion.

The fire and ice contrast is stark. I’ve seen glaciers and I’ve seen steam spewing out of the earth, along with boiling hot water and liquid clay. It’s pretty powerful.

So far, the vacation’s been quite nice, but this leg of it is almost over. Tonight I head out to my next destination. Since the flight I had to take coming here stopped in Vienna, I figured I’d stop there on the way back, too. Honestly, as enjoyable as Iceland has been, being in a different lodging every night has gotten old and I am ready to park it at an AirBnB for a couple consecutive days and do laundry.

Somehow on the tour I got a private room. I signed up to share, so this was a pleasant surprise. There was another single woman on the tour – half my age – but I guess she must have paid double occupancy, because I did not.

The rooms have definitely varied, but there’s been one consistent for me. If there’s a long hallway, my room is the furthest one down it. Oh man, it puts the “lug” in luggage – to be that far and still have to trek down one last road before pulling in for the evening.

Losing track of time

My time in The 100-Acre Sandbox is winding down, not that I’m able to keep track of it.

There’s a new set of bosses in, which means longer days initially, but it doesn’t feel like they’re long. Recently, I was in the hallway, headed to the bathroom and ran into someone locking up. I said something like, “Wow, you’re leaving early,” and she pointed out that it was almost 6:30 p.m.! I had thought it was around 4 p.m.

The weather rarely changes; it goes from hot to hotter. It was 120 yesterday, which is not unusual. Fortunately, it’s not unusual. Everywhere else is having the same kind of weather but it is unusual. But yeah, three-digit dry heat with not a cloud in the sky. Our shade is from buildings and you can see people walk in the shadows of the building to make the two-block trek to the cafeteria.

Currently, I am on my last R&R and when I return I should only have about two months remaining in my tour. It seems surreal based on my last trek to The Sandbox, when I’d signed up for two years and my position was eliminated after one and then due to external issues had to leave after 11 months. It honestly never occurred to me that this tour would last two full years, but I’m on track to do so.

The R&R, though – very welcome. Not timed well because my new No. 1 arrived the day after I left, but I had little choice. For whatever reason, my visa expired on August 10. I got a new one, but I had to leave before August 10. I’m currently in Iceland and honestly cannot tell you my itinerary. Once I decided on Iceland, I went to Tour Radar and stuck in approximate dates and times and just picked a tour. They all sounded wonderful and there have been no disappointments.

The landscape of this country – my No. 90 – changes constantly. After getting out at a tundra formed by large volcanic rocks and viewing a powerful waterfall a 10-minute walk into what we theorized looked like the surface of the moon, we drove five more minutes and were in the middle of a lush countryside. I blinked and missed the transition. Last night, we stayed at a place that looked and felt like the ranch I worked at in Colorado. Mountains on both sides, a river running through it (no Adian Quinn, Henry Elliott or Brad Pitt), sheep, horses and – a 3-kilometer walk away – an Indiana Jones-like bridge with a little cage that you cranked across with a winch.

That was just one photo op for our group, which is about 15 people. We have a Spanish couple who lives in England; a niece (around my age) and her aunt from Oregon and California; a Chinese woman and her Iranian-born husband, who have been married over 30 years and have lived in Sydney that long; a gay male Mexican couple who retired extremely young somehow; New York transplants who live in Miami and brought along their 20-year-old nephew, who is studying to be a marine ship captain; a retired gay male couple from California who are still jetlagged because their flight was so late they had to catch up with the tour; a 25-year-old Chinese girl from the same province Guangzhou is in; and me. We have a WhatsApp group and are sharing photos.

Beyond lots of waterfalls and changing landscapes, other highlights so far include geysers, gurgling clay spewing from the ground, seeing the tectonic plates where North America and Europe meet, hot springs (plus a couple dips into the freezing cold water next the hot pool), a glacier hike, the pulley bridge and ice on beaches with black sand. It’s really been phenomenal so far, and we still have whale watching and ponies to go.

The hotels have been a nice surprise, but not because I was expecting anything much in hotels. I had signed up to share a room and somehow both I and the girl from China have gotten our own rooms; I had figured they’d put us together.

After this tour, I have a couple more days in Iceland and then head to Vienna/Bratislava. My flight came through there so I went ahead and gave myself a four-day layover..

Ask and receive; believe and it will be yours (again)

Here’s documented evidence that no prayer is too small. It’s also circumstantial evidence that God has a sense of humor, but we pretty much confirmed that with so many funny-looking people walking around.

While in Key West, I decided to buy something chicken. This is, of course, because there are feral chickens everywhere. They’re ubiquitous to KW and, even for sober people like me, it never gets old seeing them strutting around.

Last year, I bought a Mile Marker Zero magnet with a chicken, so I had a little something but, when I popped into a Life is Good store and found the perfect pair of socks, I plunked down however much they wanted and walked out. I’ve started buying a lot of fun socks lately – they pack easier than rugs, I’ve discovered – and these were black/gray, so they’d match my wardrobe. They have a chicken wearing sunglasses; he’s in a crosswalk and the words “Don’t Ask” are emblazoned across the top. They’re perfect.

They sat in my drawer for a couple weeks before I finally wore them, and I showed them off for a couple days before deeming them ready for the laundry. My weekends are busy, so most of the time I dump the laundry on the bed early and sort it later; I do it on Saturday mornings – our Sunday – and that’s the day I pick up the church guests in the morning.

Point being that I didn’t go through it quickly, and that morning, I also had a command performance breakfast meeting, so it took awhile for me to get back to it. But before I did, I remember loaning a swimsuit to a visiting colleague in the hopes she’d join me for water aerobics on Saturday night. We’d both had to attend the breakfast thing, lucky us. (I did take home a lot of bacon. So much better than the regular cafeteria!)

When I got around to folding, I couldn’t find one of the socks. Anywhere. We have a communal laundry room and I made the walk down there, figuring whoever used the dryer next would have left it out; most people are pretty good that way.  No dice. I looked under, beside and behind both the washer and the dryer. I even checked the lint-catching thingie, although I knew that was impossible.

At that point, I was convinced, even though I really hadn’t had that much laundry, that I’d accidentally thrown it in with the rest of the socks, the underwear or something else. I went through everything, including the sheets, even though I hadn’t washed them.

All the time, I didn’t panic. It was annoying that of all the socks I own, one of the brand-new (and really cute) pair had gone missing. But I knew it had to be somewhere because it couldn’t have just disappeared. We have some new people on our floor, but I couldn’t imagine anyone finding and throwing away anything, let alone the cutest sock from all Key West.

I put a note on the dryer I’d used: “Did you find a sock with a chicken on this dryer? Don’t ask.” I figured whoever had found it just hadn’t folded up his/her laundry and would laugh when they made the connection between the note and the sock itself and fully expected to see the sock the next time I checked.

But I didn’t. And I didn’t the next time, either. Or the time after that. I stopped checking the laundry room every time I walked by, but my faith didn’t flag. I scrounged through my room again – seriously, it’s a one-room apartment, how many places could there be? I looked under the bed, the dresser and in the little area where I keep the laundry basket.

The following Saturday marked a week, and my hope still overflowed; it seemed likely that the person who had used the dryer after me maybe didn’t empty everything and would run across it the next laundry day. But alas, no sock appeared.

Over the Fourth, I washed my own sheets. It was off-cycle but also a free day, so why not take advantage. But as much as I wished the chicken sock to materialize, it didn’t.

And as trivial as it seems, I prayed about it. I mean, I totally confessed to God that it was stupid (like He didn’t know, right?), but I also said that I trusted the sock would turn up and asked Him to reveal it to me. And like Mark 11:24 says, I believed that I would receive the sock back to me. As silly as it was.

This week, my counterpart over at the airport facility called and said she was swinging by to return my swimsuit. She wound up standing me up for the water aerobics class and then got up super early to get back to work on Sunday, so she hadn’t had a chance to return it. She’d taken it with her, then dispatched it back with someone else, who forgot to give it to me. (Good thing I didn’t need the swimsuit!)

She brought it back, unused. I ran it home at lunch along with some laundry soap that a departing person left me. It was fried chicken Wednesday, so I basically just dropped the bags and ate. But after work, I started putting stuff up and when I dumped out the swimsuit bag, my sock fell out!

It’s just so silly, but it brought me joy. I really did have faith that it would find its way home and it did. I sure don’t know how I managed to toss it in there, but it fell right out. I did not doubt that it would turn up, but I didn’t expect it to turn up there.

Ask and ye shall receive.

Waffle Wednesdays and soft serve

Now that I’m back from my second R&R, it’s almost down to the wire. I still have another – looking at Iceland in August – but for now, it’s just the regular routine. And routine it is. With rare exception, such as today – Juneteenth – it’s the same old thing.

Nowhere is that more evident than the cafeteria. Bless those who work there; they bust their butts and I really do appreciate them, but the menu doesn’t exactly vary. Even though today’s a holiday, the snack bar closest to my office still has Reuben sandwiches. There’s no special snack bar menu for the holiday.

Sometimes, though, there is a special menu for holidays – Thanksgiving and Christmas are awesome. We also occasionally have a cake for one reason or another. This past week, there was an Army birthday cake as well as a Father’s Day cake. So while it changes it up a little bit, that’s mostly for the dessert. And the two snack bar menus are pretty much stagnant.

Tuesday nights for me are pretty brutal. We do the whole Taco Tuesday, which begins at my close snack bar with quesadillas and then the taco thing at the main cafeteria. The larger snack bar always has a chicken tortilla soup and then the non-soup option is a Buffalo drumstick. Not TexMex, but still not my favorite. (Wings would be different, but Wing Night is another time.) Essentially, I don’t look forward to Tuesday meals.

Except.

Alongside the drumsticks, there are raw carrot and celery sticks. While we have a salad bar with shaved options, this, at least so far as I know, is the only time to get straight-up carrot and celery sticks, and I love them. It’s really the only time I can get a veggie that’s not steamed to death. It probably doesn’t sound like much of a meal, but honestly, it works, especially when I also get a cornbread, which is something we always have.

And, since it’s healthy, I allow myself to get a soft-serve ice cream. Our larger snack bar has a machine, which is quite popular. On Tuesdays, since I do a light dinner, I allow myself soft serve. And, since I am trying to cut out sweet treats (of which there are so, so many always available), I look forward to it.

This week, tragedy struck when the machine broke. I have no idea what happened, but I’m clearly not the only one to miss it, because they’ve had to put a sign up outside the snack bar, announcing it’s out of service. It heads people off at the pass, because there are so many who only come in for their cold treat. It’s been dejecting. Hopefully it won’t be long, but man, I really wanted some soft serve after my carrot and celery sticks the other day.

The only redeeming factor after that dejecting Tuesday evening was the comfort of knowing Waffle Wednesday followed. This is an extracurricular day, when, outside of the cafeteria, one of the offices in my building makes waffles for whoever wants them. I have no idea when or how it started, but one day a week I can take the stairs down a floor and be overwhelmed with the smell of waffles at around 9 a.m.

At first, I thought this was an inter-office thing but eventually I realized that it’s open to anyone hungry who passes by. And these are not just plain waffles, or they don’t have to be. The waffle team prides itself on stuffed waffles, and they stuff those things with things it never occurred to me went with waffles. (Note: I don’t even think chicken goes with waffles, though that’s not an option since it’s breakfast. But, for the record, Chicken and Waffle Night is every other Saturday.) These guys – and they are all guys who serve them up – have all kinds of stuff available. It’s just too much and grosses me out. I can handle a chocolate chip, but oh man, they have everything from gummy bears to Twinkies and M&Ms. The guys take orders and make them up special.

It's really a morale boost for those who partake, I normally don’t, but the other day, one of the guys from church was the one cooking them in honor of his departure and I caved. I went light and only got a chocolate chip one but was absolutely astounded at the possibilities. Oreo-stuffed pancakes, really?   

Now, Oreos crushed up in soft serve, that I could handle.

I am nothing but a common thief. Or maybe a caloric one. Definitely a cinnamon one.

A couple months ago – time is flying! – Baghdad opened a Cinnabon store. At the time, I was temporarily working in a different office and, as a result that’s too complicated to explain, wound up at a little, private cinnamon roll party here in The Sandbox. They are as fabulous as I remember them, and now they come in different flavors, like caramel. We had some little ones, not the big giant ones, and it was a lovely treat.

For me, that’s pretty much the end of it, since it’s not like I can pop in a car and head to the mall and visit Cinnabon. Not, I guess, that I know it’s in a mall – it’s just somewhere in Baghdad. Our cafeteria does cinnamon rolls here and they’re incredibly tasty, though I try not to get them because … well, because they’re so tasty. And big. Huge. Like cinnabons.

However, last week or so, I noticed a Cinnabon bag crammed in the fridge on the office floor. Our building is configured to where there are multiple offices on a floor and there are 1-2 kitchens on each floor. Lots of people use the fridge, and, just like any other business on the face of the earth, people cram stuff randomly in office fridges. Some stuff just sits there, some gets eaten and some turn into science projects.

Ours has a bunch of milks and juice, like way too much considering there’s a little “grab and go” right downstairs if you really want something. Most stuff originated from there or the cafeteria, so I have, from time to time, helped myself to an OJ or chocolate milk and just brought one in a bit later. Once in a while, something sits there for months and months and you realize it’s likely homeless. I adopted a water bottle for myself and re-homed an unopened bottle of some kind of wine that had been sitting around for over a year.

When a bag from Cinnabon appeared, my heart leapt, but I figured it would be gone by the next afternoon. Really, unless I snooped, I couldn’t even be sure what was in the bag. Every morning it was there when I put my tea in the fridge, though. And every afternoon it was there, too, tucked behind a liter of Sprite.

After a solid week, I considered it abandoned calories. It’s bread, after all. How good could bread be after a week in the fridge? Was it even full of cinnabons at all, or was someone just camouflaging their lunch in a bag with convenient handles and a tantalizing logo? I decided to go for it, so I peeked in the bag and discovered a box built for four cinnabons and containing three of them – the big ones, too! Instead of going for broke, I liberated one. I figured I’d give the rightful owner another chance to reclaim the other two, hoping that if it happened, s/he wouldn’t remember if there had been two or three left.

When I got home, I discovered how good a week-old flavored bread could be – utterly fantastic, at least after being heated up in a microwave. So good that, when the box was still there over the weekend, I took home a second one. I ate that one super slowly, to savor it, assuming that there’d be no way the third roll would go unclaimed or, in the event that it was, still be edible.

And lo, no one removed it from the fridge or even left a nasty note. The box was still there the following work week. At this point, I figured time was running out and went for it. Yesterday, I had half a cinnabon for lunch and half for dinner. Although I could definitely tell they had been in the fridge too long, I have no regrets. And, as of the morning, there have been no “who stole my cinnabon?!” notes on the fridge. I hope whoever abandoned them comes to terms with the fact if you put

The bottle of Sprite is still sitting there, no longer providing cover for the tasty treats. Gosh, they were good.

I cannot recall the last time I ate a Cinnabon in America. My assumption is there’s still one in the Governor’s Square Mall, but I have no idea. We had one in Minsk, but I don’t recall ever splurging on one. In my travels, though, I ran across one in Yerevan and I do remember enjoying a giant gooey treat there. Maybe that’s why I liked Yerevan so much.

This is 40?

Ramadan just wrapped up here, and it’s been a busy one. I’ve been temporarily relocated to the executive office here in The Sandbox, and No. 1 has been attending or hosting the “break fast” events regularly. (For those who don’t know. Muslims break the sunup-to-sundown fast by eating a couple of dates and sipping a yogurt concoction, then have a real meal shortly thereafter.

Number 1 has been hosting groups a couple times a week, and on one of the final days of Ramadan, I attended. This one was for English students – about 40 of them averaging 15-16 years old. It was so much fun. My table had six giggling girls, all of whom spoke very good English. There were a couple of extreme extroverts who just chatted and chatted and some quieter ones who had to be drawn out a little.  We talked about movies, music, hobbies, families and so on. It very much reminded me of my Peace Corps days. When they’re yours, they’re probably very draining, but when you’re thrown in with a bunch of enthusiastic kids, it’s energizing.

After dinner, we shifted tables around and I sat with another group of mostly girls, and we, somehow, discussed bad habits. We added “procrastination” to their vocabulary, and I did one of my Peace Corps things that goes well with kids of all ages. You stand in a circle or a line, and count to 8, pumping your right fist and then your left before doing the same as you kick your right foot and then you left. Then you repeat, only to 4, then 2 and then 1. By the time you get to 1 it’s pretty enthusiastic. We did it once in English and the in Arabic, and then alternated Arabic and English – they left pretty wound up.

A lovely evening, but the best part was them asking if I was 20 years old. I can’t imagine what my face looked like, because she revised it to 25 and then to 30. I said no and one of them said, “40?” And you know what, I thought, why not?

So this is what “40” looks like for me right now. It’s from an event last weekend called Holi, which is a Hindu festival of colors. The actual event was in March, but we didn’t get the color in time, so we did it last weekend. If you think I’m colorful, you should have seen the basketball court. The food was fantastic and my T-shirt washed to a lovely shade of pale-blue tie-dye. I hope it stays that way; I’d like to make a quilt with all my T-shirts from here. The Holi event was my second Holi; several years ago, I went to Bangladesh and somehow got wrapped up into a celebration. Saw an alley with a lot of people having fun so I jumped in and came out multi-colored.  Fortunately, I had water aerobics that evening and the little bit that didn’t come out in the long shower likely melted away in the pool.

Last weekend was also a jam-packed one. It seems very feast-or-famine. I hit the gym at 5:45, grabbed a breakfast wrap, crashed for about 40 minutes, then set off running (very slowly) a 5k and then immediately regretted the breakfast wrap. Eventually, and without tossing my cookies, I made it over the finish line and almost immediately headed to pickleball. It’s popular here in The Sandbox; we even had some off-compound folks come in this time, the Canadian Sandbox’s No. 1 and a colleague. It’s always someone’s first time coming and they are immediately welcomed. It’s so much fun, but I’m not all that great. (Hoping Dede can give me some pointers during R&R.)

At one point, I was paired with a first-timer against two military-type people. A ball came at us and, somehow, I got smacked in the face. I don’t even know if it was his paddle or the ball, but it hit the bridge of my sunglasses and for a split second, I thought my nose broke. Fortunately, there doesn’t seem to be any breakage, even if, three days later, it still hurts if I touch it in the wrong place. When it happened, the three military-types ran over to see if I was OK, but I was laughing. It must have looked so silly.

This was on top of somehow managing to cut my arm without realizing it. I’d noticed something on my arm when I went to get water and tried to rub it off. A bit later, someone mentioned blood. I said I wasn’t bleeding, but she turned my arm and, sure enough, not only did I have a line of blood from some random cut near my elbow all the way down to my wrist, but my shirt had multiple blood splatters all over it.

And those aren’t the weirdest injuries I’ve had in the past week or so. Today, I hurt my finger. It’s not too bad, but it’s completely stupid. I burned it.

On a Pop Tart.

A Good Day: Any Day I Drive a Golf Cart

Traditionally, embassies’ biggest party of the year (for guests, not for staff) is a Fourth of July celebration. At these, we invite a bunch of local contacts and fellow diplomats to come over and partake in some red, white and blue fun. There’s always food and alcohol involved and the event is the more important “representational” event of the year. Since it’s ridiculously hot in The Sandbox in July, though, we do our event early. Like March early.

They require a bunch of planning, and when I was in Istanbul, I was THE planner. Before that, I coordinated all the volunteers. Even here The Sandbox before, I wound up doing something or another. Blessedly, we didn’t do one in Minsk because of COVID, but even last year – which we ultimately canceled due to a COVID resurgence – I was on the “food committee.”

Somehow, this year, I escaped. I knew nothing about the planning, which is usually done over months. I had it on my calendar but forgot about it until I got an email asking for game-night volunteers. Figuring what the heck, I threw my hat in. When the sign-up list came around for specific jobs, I saw “golf cart driver” on there and couldn’t reply fast enough.

OF COURSE I would drive a golf cart. Any day you can drive a golf cart, it’s a great day.

My office has one. It’s a four-seater and I use it to go pick up guests at the far gate, which we call “Disney.” (Remember, The Sandbox is about the size of the Vatican.) I tend to ask them if they’ve been to the compound before and if not, I usually offer to show them around a little – just to extend the drive.

Lumped in there with “other duties as assigned,” driving the golf cart is so much fun. The normal prelude is a stop by the car wash, where I get to power-wash (and suds) the thing, always risking shorting it out. Since I hose out the inside as well as the outside (“Sand”box, remember), I’m never sure if somehow I leak water into the dash or something and won’t be able to start it, but so far I’ve been lucky.

Speed bumps are tricky – especially when I wind up getting an 8-seater and have it loaded down – and the blinkers don’t seem to work but it’s totally my jam. On that lovely Independence Day Party night, I fantasized that driving a golf cart could be my retirement job. I love it.

Way back when in Detroit, I remember working the McCarty Cancer Foundation golf tournament. I was Beer Girl. Who doesn’t welcome free beer out of a golf cart? Still the best volunteer gig ever.

Independence Day night was a blast. I drove people back and forth for 4-5 hours. Fortunately, there was only one speed bump for people leaving and none for people on their way in. The way out was more fun because I got to ask all the guests their favorite part of the evening.

Mine was the band. Granted, I did not set foot in the venue, but it was outdoors and I was right outside so I could hear everything. We had an Air Force band and holy cow, they were incredible. They’d played another social event a few nights before so I knew they were good, but hello. The lead singer was awesome (and a heck of a pickleball player) and shifted seamlessly from Adele to Metallica to Charlie Daniels to Journey. Hanging around outside, I think I scared a local staff colleague by knowing ALL the words to “Devil Went Down to Georgia.”

All in all, the evening was fabulous. We had good music and great weather. I mean, I have no idea what happened inside the walls, but everyone seemed happy.

This week, too, I got to drive another of the 8-seaters for a smaller event. This one was for guests of my section, and they’re a little more laid back and were a little less dressed up. As I was driving from the gate to the venue, one remarked, “Now I know why you call it the Disney gate.”

Yep, I might have to stick in my application in a few years. It would make every day at work a great one.

Causing confusion on the way to the Seventh Continent

I’m no cheater. I play fair, even in silly marshmallow games.

By Day Five of my cruise, the natives were restless and, had we been any ordinary sea folk, probably would have mutinied. But bad weather is bad weather and, recognizing we couldn’t do squat to fix it, we went along with anything the crew offered, which included elementary school-type competitions.

I’m happy to report that my team won the paper airplane competition and tied for first in the overall competition. And that I am not a cheater – and there’s video to prove it.

My second polar circle crossing.

Yes, we had a competition involving marshmallows. This is when you take a miniature spoon and, relay style, dip into a cup of mini-marshmallows, put as many as you can on the little spoon and run down the lounge area of a boat that’s tossing and turning (I mean, we were doing this because the weather was too bad to get off the boat, after all) and dump it into your designated cup before passing the tiny spoon off to the next person on your team to lather, rinse and repeat.

Our team did crappy, in part because our first player dumped his in the wrong cup. Probably, had we cheated, we would have fared better. But we didn’t. I learned there was proof of this the evening after the games, just before the nightly wrap-up presentation.

 As people file into the little auditorium, the expedition team plays a short video file – maybe a minute. As I sat down, I realized it was the start of the silly marshmallow game. Mortified, I saw myself on the screen, hair braided and wearing an Iraq sweatshirt, in a progression that includes me:

• Running across the table with the cups, because I realized I needed to be in place to grab the spoon from the first guy and our cup was on the opposite end of the room.
• Frantically waving at the first guy to signal him to the right cup, which he didn’t notice. (It was loud; he was concentrating. Fortunately there was no sound on the video. I was yelling and waving all around.)
• Disappearing offscreen as I ran down a different aisle the bar to grab the marshmallows. I managed four.
• Running up to the cup as I hold a spoon containing a single marshmallow. You can also see three marshmallows in my hand; they’d jumped ship as I maneuvered people and a rocking ship.

Protocol dictates kissing a fish following a 
successful circle crossing. I don't know why.

Mortified, I saw this over and over because the video was on a loop. People were laughing at it because the whole thing was ridiculous; we had maybe five teams and everyone was an adult, so we looked pretty silly. (Being at sea for five days does this to you.) Gradually, though, I realized that most people’s laughter was directed to a different person on the video, my roommate.

Roommate was a fun one and we got along great, but boy, she cheated! While my on-screen likeness shows me taking great pains not to cheat, hers – over and over – displayed her also holding fallen baby marshmallows in her hand, and as soon as she arrived at the table, she dumped them in her cup. Because of the camera angle, you can’t see who pointed out that wasn’t allowed, but you seen her arguing and pleading her case – over and over. It was kind of an interesting character study.

We had a lot of characters on the cruise. There were about 120 guests and 80 or so crew. So far as I could tell, everyone got along. We had a decent amount of backpackers who had booked the trip late and just as many who had been waiting for 2-3 years to take the cruise. It was fun getting to chat with them.

Kurdagonia, not Patagonia
at the LeMaire Crossing

On of my unintended icebreakers was my Iraqi sweatshirt. It’s a pun on the brand Patagonia, but I didn’t bring it because I left from Patagonia; I brought it because I only have three sweatshirts with me now. But since we were so close to Patagonia, I had so many people ask what it meant. It says “Kurdagonia” and came from Erbil. I probably explained it to 10 people during the course of the cruise. One person even pretty much figured it out, saying he’d heard of both Kurdistan and Patagonia, but not Kurdagonia. I was like, yes, that’s it.

Now I am re-acclimating to Iraq; different desert in a different part of the world. Travel back was shorter but just as exhausting as it was on the way there. I left for the airport at 8 p.m. on Tuesday night and crawled into my apartment at 2 p.m. on Thursday. I can’t prove Wednesday existed.

But it’s back to reality now and things are looking up. Based on my email, it sounds like I’m in for a windfall. Discovered in my inbox, an unfortunate soul in Ukraine died, leaving $58m big ones.

“He had no next of kin based on the fact that his nominated was also killed during the Russian air strike but he has the same First name with you hence  I am contacting you today because you can inherit this fortune through some legal  means that I will advise because you share the same last name and with the help of the deceased personal lawyer he will prepare all necessary legal binding documents that will enable this finance firm release the mentioned amount to you if you accept this offer.”

Honestly, it is unbelievable that someone would buy that. Seriously? I share the same first name, so somehow I’m an heir? Bizarre.

Bad weather, amazing adventure

There’s no such thing as a cyclone party. They’re not a lot of fun, especially on a ship. But once you make it through, boy, making it to your destination is a lot of fun.

My second try to Antarctica got me to land. My first try, back in 2020, was on a big cruise ship that was more of a drive through than anything else. From there, I’d planned a disembarkation, but it got “weathered” out. This time, despite the weather, I set foot on the continent. You’re told to take nothing but pictures and leave nothing but footprints so I don’t have a rock, but I did leave my voice there.

But the weather … oh my. First of all, I was sick as a dog the entire first day. “The Drake Shake” – when you go through the Drake Passage with bad waves – didn’t help, but looking back, a lot of it was just fatigue. Going out, I changed one flight to cut down my Amman layover from about 15 hours to about 7, but it was still a 7-hour layover. The next flight was 2.5 hours, followed by a 4-hour layover. In Istanbul, I got on the long flight, which was to Buenos Aires, but it first stopped in Sao Paulo for almost 2 hours, and then, following a brutal 6-hour layover in the Buenos Aires check-in area (because I was leaving international and going domestic; I couldn’t hang out in the lounge and had to sit in a chair), I got on my final flight to Ushuaia. That’s when I realized my flight to Ushuaia wasn’t direct; we had a 1.5-hour stop in some other city. Seriously, I spent three mornings in airports. I left Baghdad on Thursday morning and I arrived on … gosh, I don’t even know. I think it was Saturday around lunch. I checked into the hotel, met my roommate and tried to sleep but didn’t have much luck.

So although I had a rough first morning on The Drake, I honestly think I was more tired than anything. The ship was rocking and rolling but I mostly just crashed in bed. The first night, I didn’t eat anything until the 4:30 p.m. tea; I just had zero appetite. That pretty much went for the whole cruise. The food was amazing, but I didn’t indulge, with the exception of ice cream at lunch. The scoops were tiny, though!

The weather for the first 5-6 days was awful. Horizontal rain, snow, sleet, massive (but not rogue) waves. My point-and-shoot as the photos and the cord I brought on the trip doesn’t work, so I can’t get the photos uploaded yet, but it was brutal. We had been expecting to do an excursion out on the Zodiacs on the evening of the third day and that was out of the question. The next morning, the captain tried in vain to find some reasonably sheltered place to let us off the boat, but it didn’t work. Same for the next afternoon, and the following day.

The expedition team was amazing. We had lectures – incredibly scientific – several times a day, but before the weather cleared, they were having to invent things to keep us from mutinying. Think airplane races and games with marshmallows. Everyone was still good natured about it – I mean, what can you do? – but everyone wanted us off the boat.

One night, the poor captain had a brutal time trying to find shelter. The winds were absolutely awful and, TBH, I wondered if there was a chance we might capsize. The boat, the World Explorer, was fairly new and had safety features so I really wasn’t worried but I did wonder. My roommate, however, worried. The morning after what we later learned were Cat 4-level winds rocked us, I discovered she’d slept right next to her life jacket.

With that, though, the weather kind of broke. We got out the next morning on super choppy waves. I landed in a less-crowded Zodiac and was sitting at the front, meaning I got super crushed by waves. The scenery was fantastic and I was soaked through to my underwear, despite my Minsk “waterproof” snow pants. Icebergs closer up are even more beautiful than they are from a distance, like wandering through a floating sculpture gallery. It’s never boring, but it can be cold and wet.

Seriously, it snowed. That just doesn’t happen. People built a little snowman! It was just strange weather. We had a deck covered in snow – big, fat flakes.

After the first excursion, though, the weather got better. My three layers of pants never got soaked through again, and I met penguins, whales and all kinds of seals. We visited Port Lockroy and, although I didn’t mail any postcards, I did get my passport stamped and bought a magnet. Coincidentally, I have a new tourist passport and the Port Lockroy stamp – which includes a penguin – is the first stamp in the new passport.

This was the trip I wanted to Antarctica. Although I was happy with my previous trip, the whole point had been to set foot on the continent and see critters up close, and I finally got to do that.

More later. At the moment, I am on my second trip and I am headed to see Iguazu Falls, the largest waterfall in the world. 

I am getting around

The boat leaves from Ushuaia tomorrow on the first R&R of my second tour. I’m on my third day of travel and am finally at the hotel where the cruise passengers say the day before embarkation. I didn’t think I needed an R&R before, but after getting here I am ready for break.

Although I got lucky and took the second flight out to Amman on the first day – there isn’t always a second one – this is still the third morning I’ve been traveling. I am utterly exhausted. The first day, I blissfully didn’t sleep late but woke up at the regular time and hit the gym and breakfast before catching a 9 a.m. shuttle to the help pad. The flight left at 2 p.m. and was right on time because the ambassador was also departing on the same flight. It’s still a slow plane, though, and I finally transited to Amman around 5 p.m.

Since my original plan had been to arrive there around 9 a.m. and face a day layover, I was giddy with the thought of a shorter one and canceled the hotel reservation before realizing that seven hours isn’t exactly a short layover. Then, in the first real disappointment, learned you cannot check into the airport lounge until four hours before a flight so I had basically six hours before I could get into the lounge. Fortunately, I just hunt out with some guy who works at the embassy. It made me feel bad because we’d been in the transfer line and I’d invited him to the lounge (I can always take guests but never do so I offered) and then I failed him. But we chatted until his flight left, which was around 8 p.m., after which I finished a book and then snacked on some Froot Loops before finally getting into the lounge, where I set a timer and dozed in and out for two hours before grabbing some food and getting on the flight to Istanbul.

That flight was only two and a half hours and the layover there was four, but that lounge is huge and super nice. They had showers, which was an unexpected surprise, and then I locked myself in what looked like one of those little rooms they have at the library with a reading table and a lamp. After whipping out an eye mask and yanking off my shoes, I curled up in the chair and dozed as I caught up with my morning podcasts and then had a decent breakfast before getting on the long leg, the flight over the Atlantic.

Fortunately, it wasn’t the 18 hours-plus it was billed as. Well, in all it was, but we did the first 12 hours to Sao Paulo before holding there for close to two as the plane was cleaned and 80 percent of the people deplaned. Holy cow, it had been a super full flight. The person in the window seat in my row complained because her seat wouldn’t recline, but they wound up having no empty spots to move her to, so tough luck for her.  Her husband tried to get them to re-seat her, but I never figured out why if it mattered so much to him that he just didn’t swap with her.

When we finally arrived in Buenos Aires, I utterly had no idea what day and time it was in any time zone. My body was so confused, but I knew I had six hours there. It initially didn’t sound bad because they also had an airport lounge, but I hadn’t realized I’d have to reclaim my bag and get booted out of the international terminal since the next flight was domestic. I was crushed, because that had been my dinner plan. Instead, I had three Whoppers and a mini-pack of M&Ms and regretted eating the Froot Loops in Amman. At least the airport had WiFi, though, and I downloaded some more books to read on the cruise.  I tried to doze off, but that just didn’t work.

My flight left this morning at 4:40, so around 2 a.m. I ran to Starbucks for a muffin and then went to the Buenos Aires domestic terminal, which is tiny and crowded. That’s why I stayed over in the international side for the evening – there was literally no place to sit. Even past security the next morning, it was just a bunch of people and few chairs.

Relieved, I started on the last leg when I realized that this flight, too, had a stop on the way. This travel has just been incredible. Most of the flights were absolutely fine, but I’m just so tired and I can feel my body still thinking it’s in motion.

Finally the flight arrived and I met the Quark ground people, who took the passengers to the hotels. And of course, I was the last to be dropped off at my hotel, the only one off that flight who is staying at this one.

My roommate got here yesterday and it seems positive. She is also from Florida and has lived extensively abroad. She was initially super talkative – understandable – and I hope I was coherent in my responses. At that point, I just needed a shower and a nap to feel human again.

She went to a museum, I think she said, and we may meet for dinner but I also may crash early. I tried to sleep and managed a 40-minute nap. Now I am just trying to get all photos and such off my phone so I can fill it up again.

The hotel is near the Hard Rock and I don’t know if it’s that or not, but I can hear music out the window. They just wrapped up “Eye of the Tiger” and now it’s “I Get Around.”

Tomorrow we have to be at the boat-leaves-from place around 3 p.m. and then we’ll set off! Second time doing this, but this time I’m doing the one I had hoped to do before, so I hope all goes well.

Bon voyage.