I finally did it tonight. I ordered a new pair of skis…after mine were stolen…out of my car…while in Breckenridge, CO. I was so sad because I liked those skis (2012 Blizzard Black Pearls) and because skis are expensive. It seemed that a streak was beginning. I had already lost two packages from my apartment due to misdelivery. I’m guessing it was wrong delivery because we had two packages at our apartment that were both for an apartment C, but the wrong building number. I could only guess that someone else at another apartment C was enjoying my packages. Then one morning, my roommate called as I was en route to Nebraska to pick up Kemba (my dog) from the farm. “Do you have a silver Salsa bike?” “I do. Why?” I asked. “Well, it’s lying in the road outside of our garage.” What?!? Someone had taken my bike out of the garage, most likely taken a joy-ride, and then “returned” the bike by laying it in the road in front of the garage. This bike is my nicest bike. I was horrified and starting to get paranoid about all of these incidents. Then, I talked to my friend, Anita.
Life happens. Sometimes it happens in single events. Sometimes it happens in three’s, and sometimes it happens in strings of events. I choose how I react to these. I choose how it will affect my life. So, I did choose. I was angry at first because I felt violated. Then, I was sad because I started to think about how I might miss those things. Then, I decided that they were things and life is too short to put too much thought into it. I started to look for new skis, and I bought some (2015 Blizzard Black Pearls).
I wrote off the packages. The bikes currently reside in the house. I got renters insurance. I make sure to lock everything, no matter what. No person is perfect. It’s never right to steal someone else’s stuff. It’s ok to feel violated when it’s true.
And then, each of us has the choice to go forward, to move on, to forget the packages, to save up to buy new skis. Losing and winning is part of growing in this life.
We left the beach and headed toward Miramar, Costa Rica, to see and explore more of the country. We zip-lined over 11 waterfalls and then traveled to San Jose. Part of the group flew out the next morning, while a few of us stayed back and checked out the city.
Teatro Nacional in San Jose
Statue within Teatro Nacional
View of San Jose from Museo Nacional
Butterfly Garden in the Museo National in San Jose, Costa Rica
Large spheres carved by past tribes as status or navigation symbols
Carvings in Museo Nacional
Fun San Jose artwork
Cathedral in San Jose inside
Same cathedral outside
Then, Heather and I took off on our own to explore more and headed north to the Poas Mountains area. We stayed in an awesome AirBnb, ate fresh, ripe strawberries from the local farmers and went on a coffee tour at a local plantation before seeing La Paz waterfall. Delicious, educational, and beautiful.
Bananas!
Plow pose statue at AirBnB place
La Paz Waterfall
Poas Mountains Rainbow
Garden at the Coffee Plantation
Large Hydrangia
Coffee drying
Coffee!
Coffee wagon that used to take two months to make a round-trip delivery
Coffee Tour
Though the Poas Volcano itself was a miss because heavy clouds blocked the view of the crater, we enjoyed the scenery and drove on to La Fortuna. There we took in four hours of hot springs time at Eco Terminales. By hot I actually mean warm and very different from the hot springs found in Colorado. We saw toucans and leaf-cutter ants while basking in the beauty of the warm, man-made waterfalls. Then we drove to our hostel that night, an eco-farm, Essence Arenal, with a chef on board that wanted everyone to help make their own food so that he could spread the knowledge of preparing and eating good, fresh, vegetarian food. We had vegetable lasagna and made our own “tortas” with a cookie bowl and fruit. The next morning we took the hike to see the farm and wound up doing a yoga class on our own while overlooking Arenal Volcano and the lake beside it.
Typical Costa Rican Meal
Eco Terminales Hot Springs
Heather enjoying the hot springs
Cool tree at the hot springs
Essence Arenal
View from Essence Arenal Hostel
New Animal for Me
After a couple hours exploring the shops in La Fortuna, we had to buy our bus tickets to Nicaragua. They would not allow a same-day purchase, which lead to a two-hour round-trip drive to buy tickets at a Ticabus office in Quesada before finding ourselves at our last Costa Rican destination of Finca Luna Nueva, a large eco-farm of 250 acres that was originally a ginger and turmeric farm. The pool, Jacuzzi, food, and friends we found there were unequalled. What a treat to be able to meet with Craig and Clare from Farmington, NM, and catch up on life. After chatting into the wee hours of the night (umm….9:30p), we slept and then awoke for a morning yoga session in the jungle.
Giant Bamboo
Friends
The Girls
Pool at Finca Luna Nueva
Birds of Paradise
Corn Flakes and Heather
We had breakfast with Craig and Clare, said our goodbyes, and drove away from the tranquility of the farm toward the big city to catch our bus. The drive was a solid three-hour adventure, and in the last minutes before our bus departed, Heather ran to get some emergency food for our seven-hour bus ride. We ended up with corn flakes – what she could find in five minutes with only two dollars, our strawberries from Poas, a few crackers and oreos from other parts of the trip, and a bag of peanuts. After our seven-hour saga with the corn flakes, corny movies in Spanish, and all the early 90’s love ballads we could handle, we finally arrived to Granada.
Heather is staying in Granada while doing a Spanish immersion school and staying with a host family. I was able to stay there, too, and experience a bit of her life in Nicaragua. I met her host family, volunteered with her where she both goes to school and volunteers, saw where she teaches yoga sometimes at Pure, went to a hot (think both meanings of the word) Zumba class, and ate at a few of her favorite spots. We also meandered to a few new Granada offerings. We swam, floated, and kayaked in a crater lake (Laguna), we had a spa treatment (mani, pedi, and facial for $23!), made our own chocolate, checked out the local markets, and made dinner for her host family. They kept saying how it was nice to have something different than gallo pinto (rice and beans). We ended our adventure with wine and lunch from a little European café, and then I took a taxi back to the Managua airport.
Park in Granada
Volunteering with the Kids
Market in Granada
City Center Granada
Pool at Museo Chocolate
Our Meal for Heather’s Host Family
Fiesta!
Sweating Making Chocolate
Church in Granada
Our Last Cheers
As I blog, I’m still awaiting the arrival of my luggage. I hope it comes. It’s filled with chocolate and coffee from all our adventures. I’m so thankful for this trip and these times. Choa!
In December, right before Christmas and the genesis of my travel adventures, I threw away my contacts forever. You may be thinking, oh, she got LASIK, but I did not. I mean, I tried to get LASIK. My friend Travis, who is an eye doctor for Icon LASIK put me through the whole exam to see if I would be a good candidate or not. Turns out, I was the “or not”. You see, I’m extremely near-sighted, and though I know I’m not the worst out there, if you’re not near-sighted or only near-sighted a little, it’s difficult to understand what seeing without lenses is like. For me, it was difficult even to read. Clear for me was about three inches from my face – a distance so close that I could only read with one eye at a time because the focal point for both of my eyes to focus was further out.
So, the more near-sighted you are, the more of your cornea that must be removed to correctly shape the eye to focus correctly at distance. Travis told me that I could get LASIK, but if anything ever changed, I would not have enough cornea left to make corrections. And, because one of the side effects of LASIK is dry eye, I most likely would not be able to wear contacts. I was already struggling with my contacts after my move to the Denver area. So, I would most likely be forced into glasses if anything changed, a place I didn’t want to be.
Instead, Travis recommended I get Implantable Contact Lenses (ICL). The surgery is a lot like the surgery for cataracts where the doctor makes a slit in the side of your eye, removes the natural lens, and implants a new lens. However, for this surgery I kept my natural lens. In ICL surgery, the new lens fits between the iris and the natural lens, which can cause some pressure issues in the eye. So, the other main difference ICL and cataract surgery is that I have tiny holes in my eyes that allow pressure to be released so my eyes don’t explode…or loose sight.
The left eye was first and I experienced no pain, only pressure. I felt a little pain during surgery on my right eye. When the doctor placed the lens in my eye the pressure built up and everything went black with multicolored stars – like when you’re a kid and you close your eyes and push hard on them revealing red, green, and blue stars – or at least we did that as kids. It was a little scary during surgery because I could feel the pain in my forehead from the pressure. They fixed it quickly, and the pain dissipated immediately. The surgery was finished in about 30 minutes, and my friend Anita, took me to the hotel. Things were fuzzy, but I could see. That night and for the next week, I slept with plastic eye covers taped to my face. Little by little, my vision got better.
I’m now about five months out. I have 20/20 vision. It’s not perfect. I still have a lot of glare related to the lenses in my eyes. Driving at night is sometimes difficult, but for the most part, it’s awesome. I never mess with contacts. I don’t have to take them out, or clean them. I don’t have glasses to take back-up glasses. It’s nice. And when I raft for two weeks on the Zambezi River in Africa, I will be even more thankful that I have no contacts to donate to the hippos.
My grandmother passed away today – only 23 days after her 100th birthday. It’s difficult for me to imagine all the changes she saw and experienced in her 100 years while what I experienced with her was so different. When her life started in 1914, WWI began, Babe Ruth signed his first minor league contract, and Tarzan of the Apes was published. She saw the Nazi party form, women win the right to vote, and Al Capone move to Chicago when she was a kid. As a teen, she learned how to cope with The Great Depression while playing steel guitar with her sister. She married my grandpa in 1938, and in 1942 when WWII started for the United States, she waited to receive post cards from her new husband while he served in the army. A year after Germany surrendered and the war ended, my mom was born and they lived on the family farm where my grandparents raised crops and a few farm animals. Five years later, my grandma had my aunt, completing their little family of four, all while Grandma performed different jobs driving a school bus, cleaning the local elementary, and running K’s Cafe. She saw Model T’s transform into Teslas; stamps soar from two cents to forty-two; and crank phones morph into smart phones. She and my grandpa celebrated 51 years of marriage while he was in the hospital dying from emphysema in 1990 because earlier in their lifetime smoking was healthy. I didn’t realize when she told me about the “blue moon” shining outside, she had watched the first man land on the moon. She lived through the space war, the Cold War, The Korean War, the Gulf War, 9/11, and the War on Terrorism, and still had time to teach me how to embroider french knots and make sweet potatoes with marshmallows. She was an amazing cook, patient listener, and incredible grandma, and I celebrate the life she had as she now dances in the glory of her Savior. I asked her on her 100th birthday how she lived a life that long, and she said, “I just roll with whatever comes my way.” May I learn from her example of life and love.
I lived in the same place for five years. I had no idea how much I had accumulated in that time frame. So when the time came to pack up and set out on this unknown adventure, I had three garage sales to get rid of stuff. No matter what you’re selling, garage sales only yield 1/6th to 1/8th of the original value of the item – if you’re lucky, but even if the monetary yield is low, the cultural experience is always guaranteed to be high. At my first garage sale held in conjunction with three other friends, I decided to sell my steel Samurai sword. I obtained the sword through a series of obscure events. It started with an ex-boyfriend picking up a load of “treasures” from the curb, which included a Rubbermaid organizer of various crafting materials, an ironing board, and a large, framed picture of a Sussex rooster. Serious randomness on the last item. It made me laugh so hard that I kept it and took it with me when I moved to Farmington, NM, on my second rotation with my employer. En route I stopped in Red River, NM, to see my older brother and hang out a bit with him and his friends. Rooster, a fellow bar tender with my brother and crowned with red hair, thought that Farmington was so dangerous that I needed a weapon for protection. You see, his brother and wife had lived there and experienced a drunken, unknown man walking into their house, laying down on their couch, and falling asleep. Based on this second-hand experience, I clearly needed something. We decided that he would give me his samurai sword in exchange for the picture of the Sussex rooster, his namesake. Thus, I ended up with a full-size samurai sword for protection in Farmington, NM. I finally decided to sell it at the first garage sale after no one wanted it on Craigslist. The buyer of the sword rolled up to the garage sale in a suburban with a lawn mower strapped on top. He was a gruff guy with a gruff voice, random tattoos everywhere, and scars that I’m certain had some scary stories to go along with them. He also had on a hot pink shirt and was packing heat. Could I make this up? Deep gruff voice: “How much for the sword?” he asked. Everyone’s eyes turned toward me. “Ummmm…$10,” I nervously answered. “I’ll take it, and this truck for my daughter.” Of course you have a daughter that plays with trucks. Yes, I can make change. With Samurai sword in one hand, truck in the other, and gun on the hip, he hopped in his mower-laden suburban and drove to the next garage sale. It’s a good thing we were all drinking Bloody Maries for our garage sale or we may have thought that was an odd situation. I am curious to know more about his story. I guess some things will be left unknown.
