Let's see. Where, at which chapter did I leave off last time? I think I'll start off at one of my favorite beaches from this trip so far, Playa Samara. It was a ideal crescent shaped beach on the Pacific side of Costa Rica, with some fun tides for swimming, and some smallish waves to re-learn my surfing...

            One of vendors noticed me eying his pile of rambutan, a small red fruit resembling a giant raspberry with soft outer spikes, protecting a gummy white fruit and large seed inside.  He cracked one open for me to try on the spot, and the mildly sweet and pungent tartness allowed me to...

    I'm sitting in the Purple House Hostel in David, Panama checking my email for the first time in days.  And yes it's literally purple; purple walls, purple dishes, purple rocks, right down to purple ashtrays...  I'm sitting around with a few other American folks watching Barak Obama's face...

            So after my totally gung-ho, "yes-to-everything" previous post, I think my theory kinda kicked me in the butt.

 

            Turns out that saying "yes" to everything wasn't such a good idea after all, specifically when my work supervisors started catching...

  Even without a car, I've somehow managed to get up to the mountains twice in the past week.  Living in Anchorage during the summer is a complete waste of time if you cannot get away into the mountains.  So anytime a friend calls me up to see if I'm interested in going to the mountains, my response...

I have a regular job.  An apartment of my own.  

And no one has stolen my bike since my last report.

It rained almost nonstop for the past month, but the weather has improved considerably in the past week.

Things are doing ok in my part of the world.  Not fabulous, not exhilarating, but ok....

Thumping music, strobe lights, foam machine, cowboy hat, and dancing like you just don’t care.

I miss morning yoga to the sound of waves. I miss the guy who sold mangoes for 50 cents from his tricicleta. I miss my kitchen boys, “Oy! Pan pita, hoy!” with greasy t-shirts and dark...

            “Hey there, how’s it going?” a wholesome-looking fellow greeted me as I scooted over to make room for him on the bike rack in the Safeway parking lot.  I was fastidiously loading groceries by order of weight into my panniers, when this young man with an outdoorsy beard and...

  I am home.

  To me, home is Alaska.  It's not any town/city/building in specific, but the whole of it-- the old familiar neighborhoods, the quirky wildlife, the unbeatable scenery, and the accessibility of the great outdoors.
  I have no plans about what I will be doing in the near future, but...

After I got my lazy butt out of Dublin, I've seen some wonderful areas around Ireland. I traveled first to Cork (the second biggest city in Ireland), and while it's still a city it at least had some greenery and even a river flowing through it, so it wasn't grey and gloomy like Dublin.

From Cork I...

My surroundings have changed again! After my exciting (but shortened due to extraneous reasons) cycling trip, it was really time to leave Spain—honestly, my 90 passport days were nearly up. I spent about a week visiting a distant cousin in Sevilla, and moved on.

One of the few places not included...

  I finally got out of Tortosa after being trapped for about two days more than necessary. I arrived on the weekend, and therefore had to wait to get the bike reparations I needed, plus all that untrained biking led to a bit of a head cold.
  Two good days/nights of rest were enough to get me...

Ametlla and Ten Kilometers Back

The next couch I had planned was in Tortosa, another 50 miles south. I did not want to cycle that far in one day, especially since at 11am I still needed to tune up my bicycle and ditch a lot of things (I don’t need three pairs of pants, clogs, and a few books...

Over 60 miles... about 100 kilometers.

  I had no idea what to expect, all I knew was that I was going South, and has a couch to stay in Tarragona. I didn't know what roads to take, I didn't know how much stuff to bring and how much to leave behind, I didn't know how fast I could travel on two...

Crumbs were her favorite.  After a loaf of bread or bag of crackers had been finished off, Maja would pour out the specks of grain into a small bowl and stir in a little marmalade or milk.  It was her special treat since we were devoid of sweets, so people learned not to throw things away too hastily.

This is Trip Taco: Part III from the reproduction of Facebook notes that I've been posting since May 23, 2007.  It's an impromptu but thoughtful account of what I like to call "Trip Taco." I'll post it in three parts correlating with the three general areas that the hand of Trip Taco has touched: "Roadtrippin...

This is Trip Taco: Part II from the reproduction of Facebook notes that I've been posting since May 23, 2007.  It's an impromptu but thoughtful account of what I like to call "Trip Taco." I'll post it in three parts correlating with the three general areas that the hand of Trip Taco has touched:...

This which I am about to post will be a nearly identical reproduction of Facebook notes that I've been posting since May 23, 2007.  It's an impromptu but thoughtful account of what I like to call "Trip Taco." I'll post it in three parts correlating with the three general areas that the hand of Trip...

In my new home on the northern end of Sant Vincenç dels Horts, I’d grown accustomed to a staple diet of oranges, yogurt, and chocolate sandwich cookies.  I’d also grown accustomed to the mullet-headed children riding bicycles, the Spain-ish lisp, the large guild of stray cats and their abandoned...