I came up with the idea to do this post after stumbling across Alastair Humphreys’ post a week or so ago. I’d never heard of Alastair before that night and the only reason I had was because I’d just voted for Jennifer Pharr Davis as the National Geographic Adventurer of the Year for 2012. I clicked through to see who else was nominated and followed through to Alastair’s blog and wa-la, here was this magical blog post. Actually, there’s a lot more magic and adventure with Humprheys that I will talk about later (I’m still writing/ruminating my Living Adventurously post).
Anyway, I’ve been to some cool places in my life but there are still places I want to go to and a few I want to go back to. Here’s my top 10 list of places to visit…maybe some are far-fetched, maybe not???
In no particular order:
Prince Edward Island, Canada: This love affair has been on going since I was 9 and first read Anne of Green Gables. Yes a day or two in the touristy Anne areas but then I would meander around the island slowly, taking photographs and relishing the red dirt island of L.M. Mongtomery.
Antarctica: Um, hello, big adventure! Now, I don’t need to go to the South Pole or anything, but setting foot on the continent itself would be great, maybe visiting McMurdo Station, check out some Weddell seals and of course a few penguins. Going to the bottom of the Earth would be awesome!
Salar de Uyuni: Bolivia’s Uyuni Salt Flats. The brief one week I spent in Bolivia was mostly spent in the tropical areas of the southeast and not near the salt flats. If I went again, this is where I’d want to go.
Paris, France: This one will have to be a long term affair. My dream would be to live there for a year, soaking up the culture and learning the language fluently, seeing all of the historical landmarks, doing plein air paintings in the many parks and sightseeing the whole country. I’m jealous of my friend Rosemarie who is living in France for a few months this fall and winter as her husband goes to school there.
The British Isles: Again, I think I’d have to live in each of these countries that make up the British Isles in order to fully enjoy them. That and I’d want to do the Coast to Coast hike or any one of the numerous pub to pub hikes in Ireland or England.
Patagonia: A friend from college went to Patagonia a few years ago and as I looked through her photos I realized this region of Argentina and Chile had to go on my list of places to visit. I haven’t done enough research to figure out where I’d want to go exactly, but I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t be disappointed with anywhere I went!
Rancho Nuevo, Mexico: Seeing an arribada of Kemp’s ridley sea turtles…*awesome*! I could also handle Ostional, Costa Rica to see their turtle cousins the olive ridleys. My hiking trail name is Ridley for a reason!
Oyamel Fir Forest, Mexico: Another place involving masses of fauna in one places, the winter home of the monarch butterfly!
Everest Base Camp: This one might be a bit cliché but I think it would be fantastic! I ruled out climbing to the top of after reading Into Thin Air, when I said no thank you to pulmonary edemas and other high altitude illnesses that often result in death. Despite the fact that many people go to base camp, I don’t think enough people in the general public have gone to make it a ‘routine’ place to visit.
New Zealand: Some friends of ours in Florida, geocachers named FootTrax aka: Chris and Sarah, went there for their honeymoon and did a backpacking trip through some of the national parks there. Their photos were beautiful and I’ve heard New Zealand is the new Australia, as in, it’s the cool place to go.
Now for the places I want to go back to:
Galapagos Islands, Ecuador: Five days on three islands was not enough time during the summer of 1998. One of the islands we only spent one day on due to a protest on the island that prevented us from being able to go ashore. What I saw was just a teaser, a trailer to a larger adventure and more beautiful sights. It was freakin’ amazing!
Bolivia: Yeah I mentioned the salt flats, but I only spent a week in Bolivia and I want to see more! It is such a diverse country, high altitudes of La Paz down to the western Amazonian jungles…so much there to see!
The Bath’s, Virgin Gorda, British Virgin Islands: I think it was my parents 20th anniversary when we went to the BVI and at the last minute we kids got to tag along! We primarily stayed on Tortola but one day we took the ferry over to Virgin Gorda to sight see. Unfortunately for me I’d got a speck of sand or salt from the ocean in my eye and it had been irritated enough to go to the doctor on Tortola and I was thus banned from swimming. Therefore I did not get to enjoy The Baths much at all! I would revisit Tortola, too. I could enjoy also a Pusser’s painkiller now whereas I was only 15 then!
So, what about you? Where do you want to go? Entice me with your list so I have more places to add to mine!
+I’ve been faithfully watering the garlic and dill on our back porch every other day. The dill is doing so-so, not really growing like I thought it would and the garlic was taking forever to come up, so long that I worried it wouldn’t. Then I saw this last night. One sprout emerging.
+Chris got a bit excited about garlic in the summer and started hunting down elephant garlic which he found at a grocery store and then I think he ordered some online as well. Then he bought a few garlic books. I flipped through one right after we moved in and didn’t realize how interesting garlic could be!
+Sometime in late spring or early summer we will harvest the garlic and have enough for a year. I love that! Right now our kitchen cabinets are full of pickles and the freezer is full of cut up zucchini and squash to use at a later date. If only I had enough jars of tomato sauce to last me a year. I miss that.
+I’ve missed writing here but I’ve been keeping myself busy. I’ve written a few thousand words on my book and have done some crocheting, plus random errands and such.
+My one adventurous thing for the week has been to try mead. I saw it at the store and almost bought it last weekend when my mom was here but didn’t. Tonight I decided to go for it. It tastes pretty good, a tad sweet, sweeter than Moscoto or Riesling. I might throw some of the mulling spices that came with it to see how it tastes.
+Hoping to have some time to write some blogs later on Sunday evening, but we shall see. It will be a full weekend as my brother and his family are all coming—that means toddler and baby fun!
Hi! After breaking out of my usual blog routine I realized the whole What I Wore Wednesday is more popular than I thought. Not that anything I wear is that interesting, normally, I’m pretty casual as is evident in this photo. But I was really digging what I wore yesterday so I thought I’d share.
Plus I got my hair cut last week and then had my mom dye my hair for me this last weekend while she was here. As I’ve gotten older my hair has become more ash-blonde than blonde-blonde and I really don’t like it all that much. I liked the brown I did to get rid of the pink hair last Fall but I let it go back to ashy-blech-blonde for awhile and then did a auburn in late summer and this time around I went for Medium Golden Blonde which apparently is more red than I thought. But I like it.
It looks more blonde in the photo than I think it truly is, either that or the highlights are showing through. I haven’t done self portraits in a long time, not since my 365 portrait stint a few years ago.
My posts for November are going to more sporadic than my usual daily postings. Maybe at least three times a week, but I’m going be trying hard do some writing, I have some crochet projects to get busy on (there are babies galore around here!) so I want to focus on that. I do have the beginning of a post on being adventurous started and I think it will end up being a multi-part series, so I’ll also be working on that as well as photos and a post on the trip to the ‘Grand Canyon of Pennsylvania’.
My goals for November:
+Write an hour each day for Nanowrimo
+Alternate between running and yoga each day
I think I’ll keep it that simple, I tend to throw too much on my plate!
Happy November!
Posted by mlittle on November 1, 2011 at 6:40 am under Thoughts. 3 Comments.
This was taken on my last day working in PA. The colleague with me wanted to get her picture taken on the log and after I shot a few of her I thought that perhaps I should go. I was leery at first because Chris will tell you that I am accident prone. It runs in my immediate family; we drop things, fall, slip, trip all the time. I just saw myself getting on this log and sliding right off and into the creek and subsequently being soaking wet for the hike back to the car.
I had a chance this summer to swim across the Neches River in the Big Thicket and I didn’t take it. I really should have, it was hot and the tannin rich, muddied water was perfect for cooling off. After seeing this log I thought of that moment, of not taking the time to do something a little out of my comfort zone, and decided to go for it. Of course I took all electronic equipment off of me just in case the whole thing went south, but it didn’t.
Now that we’re nearing down to the last two months of 2011 I was wondering what I have done that is Possible for my word this year. The Florida Trail. Some interesting trekking situations in the Big Thicket. Choosing a job and moving. I probably haven’t utilized this word to its full potential, sometimes I refer back to adventure instead.
In the next two months I will see about making several things possible. Actually doing Nanowrimo on something I’ve already started writing and need to make significant progress on. Actively working on updating our photography site and getting better at trying to find potential portrait clients. This is something I’ve said before but it seems I kept being thrown curveballs and was unable to really make that a possible situation. I need to make possible some better communication with friends and keeping in contact with many of them. Of course that is a two way street, there’s only so much I can do. In this age of social media everyone seems much more disconnected.
So, we’ll see how possible works out for the rest of the year and will ruminate on next years word.
Speaking of next year, how is it nearly 2012? Chris and I were just talking about a geocaching event The Florida Finders Fest, and we won the first one with our friends team FootTrax. That was six years ago. That was the very same weekend that we drove back from North-Central Florida down to our place in Broward county, boarded up our windows and bunkered down for Hurricane Wilma. Earlier in the weekend they weren’t sure where it was going and only that morning we drove back did we know for sure it was going to come across Florida at Chokoloskee and sweep across Florida to Broward county.
See, here’s a retro photo of us and our friends Chris and Sarah. Digging that face paint! Flickr tells me that was taken on our old digital camera that used to take a mini-cd to store the photos. Classic! Thought I couldn’t find any Wilma shots but went to my old Photobucket account and got these.
I’m not sure why I drove to work the next day but I did. A few other souls did too. Lots of trees in the roadway.
And because now this post has turned into a trip down memory lane:
When we started getting into orchids at our apartment in Miami. That vanda was my first one and I got it for my…24th birthday. It died within 6 months. We finally figured out how to keep orchids and then our collection grew. This is also the skinny-runner girl version of me. I kinda like my haircut—think I need to get it chopped off again. Ok, now that I went back and looked at that vanda, this is another vanda we got for $60 at an orchid show, a steal for this sized vanda. It ended up being like 8′ tall from roots to top of the plant by the time we sold it when we left Florida. It was monstrous!
Thanks for the memory lane tour—now I’m off to make some things Possible!
+Heading back to Texas this week. Chris is switching with me, taking my place here while I go home to our cats. Looking forward to being home again and seeing my cats and the garden.
+I will miss the hills and beauty of the area. I won’t miss the cold, dreary weather we’ve been having here in PA. It definitely reminded me why I enjoyed Florida winters so much.
+Back in April I read on My Topography, Christina wrote about contributing to The 3six5 a blog collaboration. I was interested so I signed up for it. My day was yesterday. Go check it out! It was fun to remember signing up for this and not knowing where I would be. I remember choosing a weekend day so that I might actually be able to write it up—and here I was working in the field today anyway.
+Itching to do some crocheting. Finished one baby blanket and need to start another but am dying to get to work on some clothing pieces and also thinking about Christmas gifts, too.
+Deal & Steadee are bouncing through Georgia on their way to Springer. Should be done on Monday sometime! Exciting! I can imagine how they feel—excited, ready to be done but feeling bittersweet about the whole ordeal.
+If you like books, Elizabeth is doing a read a thon. I’m sure she will have some great reviews!
+That’s about it! Have a lot on my agenda when I get home.
+A weekend off. I feel like I’ve been going a million miles an hour for the last few weeks. Been very busy at work and then we had another project sprung on us at the last minute, or so it seemed, and now I am going to Pennsylvania for a month. I was thinking two weeks sounded nice but a month is pushing my limits. I’m becoming a homebody again. Apparently there’s this thing called snow that we’re racing against.
+I’m starting to like not checking FB often and only being on about once a week. The only downside is that it seems the only way to get any idea of what is going on with people is through FB because apparently email and phone calls are just impossible. I’m not the best at calling people but I do email folks. And while I am working on being better at returning emails or keeping an email going (unless it just doesn’t need to continue) I just wish that FB wasn’t the be all and end all on finding out how people are.
+We were walking into REI last night to pick up, well, we were just browsing because they were having extra sales on clearance items and such and I noted to Chris that everything but the bra I was wearing could have been bought at REI. In fact I think the only thing that wasn’t were my Keen flip-flops. REI—*love*. The problem now is that we just don’t need any gear so we mostly wander around and browse. I did instantly pick up Paddling the Wild Neches a few seconds after walking in because it was conveniently placed near the kayaking gear. I snagged it and we bought it with a 20% off coupon. Having spent so much time on and near the Neches this last spring and summer it has become very interesting to me. I’d love to paddle around it some time, that and the Trinity. There are lots of beautiful places in Texas that just don’t get the respect or use they deserve.
+Now that we are cooking and planning meals as well as starting preserve what we grow I’m becoming very interested in whole foods and eating more sustainably. Not that I wasn’t already but it feels nice to try to put it into use. I find eating out less interesting now, especially at mediocre restaurants that we could duplicate the meals at home. And since we are pickling our own cucumbers I pointed out to Chris how they use dye to color the jars at the store. And then he pointed out yesterday the tomatillo salsa I grabbed at Taco Cabana seemed suspiciously bright green.
+Summer is gone. Well, not officially, the autumnal equinox is still a week or so away. But, the lighting is different, it gets dark earlier and light later. I don’t like the light later thing, rather I don’t like either one. I’d prefer if it got light at about 5:30am daily and got dark at about 10pm. Year round. At the very least, in the winter it should get dark only at about 8pm, no earlier.
+Working on some posts for next week. I’ve got a list of adventure books that I’m writing about, plus I’ll have a post about a week of our pre-planned meals and how they work out. We’re going to do another long day hike this weekend so I’ll have a post on that I’m sure. Plus, I crocheted some baby hats for two coworkers that are having kids soon and so I had Leo model them for me. He’s good at that. Samson wouldn’t cooperate so Leo got the modeling duties.
+Trying this yoga thing about more. I got a really good book at the library, so good I renewed it. Right now I am working on mastering some poses before I start working on a series of poses. I am out of shape. Yes, hiking all those miles in the last year was good cardiovascularly but my stretching ability is almost nonexistant. I can still touch my toes but my days of doing splits and other gymnastic tricks are long gone. I always drool at the really cool yoga poses like scorpion pose, but I know I have to work my way up. Right now I am focusing on headstand, which I’ve been able to get up in and stay for several seconds, but my goal is to get to a minute in the nearer future. Was mostly inspired by Katie’s post on it. Yesterday I was up for a few seconds and came down early because I noticed ants walking across the floor. They looked very large and much darker upside down!
+Part good news on my hard drive problem, I found some tiff files without my signature on the files of all of my photos that are on our website. Bummer news it that other files besides that are still on the hard drive. So, I can print ‘good’ photos but other photos I don’t know about. I’m also going to be eliminating some photos from the portfolio; I decided there are several that aren’t strong enough. Frankly I do not like a lot of my landscapes, I’m just not that strong at them.
+Chris and I are getting two large canvases of our photos printed. See, I’m pretty easy going on agreeing to a photo but Chris usually doesn’t like what I like. So, we’ve had to debate on what photos of mine to print. It is very frustrating! Anyway, the one of mine we decided to print isn’t on the website but hopefully in the next few weeks it will be. I’m going to be reworking them all and then getting much more serious about selling stuff. Still up in the air about portrait photography. Really want to do it but not sure how to go about finding clients, especially in a new area. Hrm.
+Just finished a book that I will be chronicling on the adventure book post, but I’m about to delve into teen novels with The Hunger Games. I actually don’t know much about it, kind of how I was with Twilight. My basic premise for reading them is to read the books before the movie comes out, much like I did with Twilight. I read it literally days before it came out in theaters. I come late to the game most of the time. I was going to lament that one of my favorite recent YA series A Great and Terrible Beauty should be made into a movie and what does Google get me?….a movie! in 2013. Sweet! Well, crap. More digging has given me this movie canceled from the author herself. Damn!
+I guess that’s about it. I need to spend some time doing some creative things in the next week…getting some projects rolling more.
Yesterday we were all ready to go to DFW for the weekend, it was about 2:30 pm. We were heading into town to return a RedBox before heading out and as we approached town we’d noticed that the fires were flaring up. It had been a peaceful morning with no smoke and we’d decided that it was probably ok to venture out. However, once we arrived in town, it was chaos with everyone standing at the intersections, in the gas station and grocery store parking lots, some with chairs, many with smart phone or cameras to take videos. Several fire engines from around the state arrived within minutes, probably moving from other areas of the fire to attack the flare up. We stood around for a bit in the gas station parking lot then went across to McDonald’s to see what was being posted on the Fire Marshal’s page. We’d opened the laptops briefly when Chris saw that they’d posted that the main road to our area was being closed. We rushed home to see what was going on only to find out a bit later that they were a bit early on closing our street.
Deciding to cancel our trip to DFW, we went back into town to get back on the internet and find dinner for the night at the store. We’d been home a few minutes and I was talking to my mom on the phone when Chris told me to come outside. We could hear the constables driving down the main road in our area telling everyone to evacuate. Great.
We’d had everything by the door for several days after various possible threats but we still had to scramble for a bit and made several sweeps throughout the house. The cops drove down the road twice telling everyone to get out and then they never came back. We could hear the neighbors gathering their horses, cows and the stubborn donkey to trailer away. Our landlord had been out to his mom’s house and had to convince the cops to let him back into the neighborhood. We ended up staying for about two hours after the evacuation orders because the fire had slowly, at least seemingly, been dying down a bit. This allowed us to gather more of our stuff and let the cats relax a bit before we shoved them in their cages later.
There are at least five smaller planes and several helicopters tackling the fire and a DC-10 flew in from California to help tackle the blaze. At one point they were flying right over our house. That is the video of the DC-10 below.
We made dinner and ended up staying until just about dusk when we decided to walk up the road and peek down our main road to see if the road was blocked. We’d decided if it was blocked we’d leave because we wouldn’t be able to keep a good eye on the fire if we were sleeping and since it was dark outside we couldn’t see anything. So, we loaded the cats up, went to the library for one last check of the update and then drove to my coworker’s house in Spring.
We’re hoping we can get back into our house today, because the cats aren’t happy and I just want to be back in my big king bed! That and fires are much more stressful than dealing with hurricanes.
I intended to do a photo of the plane as it flew by but I’d had my camera set to video so it is a quick and dirty video and a bit dark. I have a video of the fire from the gas station but it is taking awhile to upload so I’ll have to do it later.
Hope we get home soon.
Edited 6:41pm:
This was about 3pm on Friday afternoon from 1488 and 1774.
Posted by mlittle on September 10, 2011 at 11:55 am under Thoughts. 1 Comment.
+It’s the end of a weird week. Started off with a holiday on Monday, which was wonderful and we got a 13+ mile hike in at the Sam Houston National Forest. Tuesday was busy at work and then yesterday I was in the field and had a very long day, not returning home until well after 8pm. Then the smoke from the nearby fires lingered in the air causing our office to let everyone work from home on Thursday if they had something to work on. Feeling a little disjointed after having some semblance of routine.
+Excited to see the family this weekend as we go up to get the last remaining bits of things we have up in DFW. It might be a few months before we get back up there because we have various things planned in the coming months but I know some of them might come down to see us.
+Had an interesting conversation with a fellow at McDonald’s the other day when I went up to check email and write blogs. Well, interesting because the guy bordered on annoying. Here I was moving to a new, small town by choice and this guy had lived here his whole life and wanted to get out. Financial and personal situations aside, if you want to move, move. The guy then went on to complain about the police and just had random thoughts that I kindly tried to listen while also paying more attention to my laptop, hoping he’d get the hint. Just made me think about how easy it is to think we’re stuck in a situation permanently, when most of the time it is only a choice to stay stuck.
+We had a brief encounter with fall the other day. Beautiful temperatures, crispness in the air, of course this was also the day the fire started. Chris crushed my dreams of the coming Autumnal Equinox by saying that the highs would be back in the high 90s later this week. *bummer*
+Crops are coming in good at the garden. Might be battling some sort of fungus on our zucchini but aren’t sure yet. Did some spraying of milk on the leaves and picked a few of the worst ones off, but I’m still not convinced yet. Normally I don’t really worry about plants having problems, mostly because in Florida anything in the curcurbit family would just keel over in days because of bugs. I gave up and stuck with tomatoes and things that wouldn’t be eaten by vine boring bugs.
+Planning our meals out has become so fun that I almost don’t want to eat out when it is our eat out night. Chris begs to differ because he wants a night off from cooking, but I like eating at home and having good meals. It has really shown us how much we do and don’t eat and how much we forget what we have even though our fridge and cabinets are not as stocked to the brim as they were at our house in Florida.
+Working on an Adventure Reading blog post to come next week, I think. I’m hoping to finish Between a Rock and a Hard Place, aka: the 127 Hours movie, before I write it up. Saw the movie a few weeks ago and then got the book at the library. So far it is much more detailed the movie, more about his life in adventure prior to that fateful day in the desert canyon. Good reading so far!
+Want to try to move forward on photography soon, but might have to be redoing my portfolio because I pretty much broke my backup hard drive with the important files on it. Chris has been working on it but has been unsuccessful so far and the hard drive company said that it would cost between $700 to $2000 for them to fix. So, Chris is going to be attempting more fixes for awhile. I basically broke the USB connection that goes to the hard drive and while Chris can get some sort of connection he can’t access the folders. Anyone tech-minded know of a solution?
+It’s my dad’s birthday! HAPPY BIRTHDAY!
+What is going on with you?
Posted by mlittle on September 9, 2011 at 6:22 am under Thoughts. 2 Comments.
Yesterday, Labor Day here in the U.S., we had stopped in at the McDonald’s in our town to get some recipes so we could go grocery shopping for the week. When we left to drive across the street to the store we noticed a fire to our north west that had just started within thirty minutes. By the time we left the store thirty minutes later it was flaring up even more.
We didn’t think anything of it, not that it would get bad or even come closer to our house which would be several miles away by now. We went home and I took a nap and while we were having dinner Chris noticed it was getting further south. In fact at about 7pm when I left to go get a RedBox at the McDonald’s and attempt to come up here and blog the fire was due west of us. These are the photos from our backyard at that time.
It continued to get worse but we didn’t think anything of it because the wind was blowing the fire and smoke the other way.
Chris’ mom was calling very frequently and for some reason my phone doesn’t want to ring with incoming calls so I had no idea my parents had called twice. That paired with a decrease in cell service due to the massive volume of emergency services going around we didn’t get as many calls as we thought.
As we went to bed it was getting cooler out and the wind died down and by 10pm there was a reddish glow in the distance but thirty minutes later it was gone. This morning it seemed to be under control and for most of the day at work, only four miles from my house, I barely heard any sirens. Then after lunch the wind picked up and the sirens returned. We were allowed to leave early because the wind switched to blow to the south and east and to alleviate breathing difficulties the workers could go home. It didn’t matter to me, I was planning to stay because what was home versus work only four miles away? Then Chris called and said that I should probably come home because ashes were falling around the house and the smoke was coming closer but you really couldn’t tell if the fire was closer or if it was just the smoke. We don’t have internet or tv so we’re getting information via phone or our neighbor.
So I went home early. We gathered stuff up at the door and now it has died down yet again. So. We wait. Hopefully that will be it and things will get under control.
