Still on the move

After a walk on the beach into Guayabitos to pick up some things, I’m back in the door of my hotel room listening to the birds and the breeze in the palm fronds and generally enjoying a quiet day while Barb deals with domestic details, getting her kitchen counter modified to fit a new stove which she and Rod are buying this morning.  In the afternoon, they will meet with a lawyer to discuss details of land ownership and putting an extension on their casita.  After being rootless for so long, I almost wish I were busy with such matters, but in a few months I will probably be wishing I could teleport myself to exactly where I am.  Such is human nature.  So I will enjoy where I am while I’m here.  I do think that moving about has kept me from dwelling on sadness.  I’m reading a book now, River of Doubt, Theodore Roosevelt’s Darkest Journey by Candice Millard.  It’s really well written, and as I knew little of his life, very informative.  He was apparently a physically frail and asthmatic child whose father told him at one point that he had the mind but not the body and that without the latter he wouldn’t go as far as he should.  He told him it would take hard drudgery to make a body, but he could do it, and Teddy did. As a teen, he worked out incessantly. He came to relish exertion and ever afterward sought relief from sorrow and defeat in difficult physical challenges.  His journey down the Rio da Duvida in Brazil was the most difficult of those challenges. One of his earlier ones was after his first wife died of Bright’s disease.  Then he went to the Dakota  Badlands to travel and live under harsh circumstances.  When he returned, he said almost nothing of the death or the time spent except to make one comment, “Black care rarely sits behind a rider whose pace is fast enough.”   

Barb and I are suffering through our second day of some kind of food poisoning.  We can’t figure out what caused it because we ate what Rod ate and he didn’t get it.  I threw up until my throat ached on Saturday night and so did she.  We’ve hardly had anything to eat since and still feel queasy, headachy and generally dragged out.  They will probably join me here in the afternoon for a rest by the pool.  Maybe we’ll even go in it for the first time.

Below are 4 shots that I took this morning as I walked along the ocean.  The fishermen keep their boats in the estuary that runs by Barb and Rod's place, but in the dry season the mouth silts over and to get out to fish in the ocean they have to roar the boat over the sand.  It you look carefully in the first shot, you'll see a stick with an old pair of under ware flying from the top of it just ahead and to the left of the boat.  This functions as the marker for the guy driving the boat as he revs the motor, takes a run at the sand bank and slides as far as he can over it.