Bill and Wendy's ickcillint adventures

We arrived in Puerto Vallarta last night and the cab driver cautioned us about going to our destination hotel, La Rosita. The reason for his caution was that three American touristas had been shot dead outside that hotel the night before. Paternally, our driver kindly suggested an alternative hotel and we accepted his recommendation given that we, ourselves, were dodging bullets a few short days ago in Mazatlan. On top of the risks to personal safety we ourselves have witnessed in Mexico, there is some security concern for our youngest daughter, Lisa. Lisa, has been teaching English in South Korea for nearly a year. A week ago, she was sent a high security notice from the Canadian Embassy requiring her to have all documentation, belongings and money in hand and to ready herself for evacuation from Korea at any time the Embassy deems the security risk intolerable. We are all aware of the dictatorship in North Korea and the concern regarding that type of political instabili...

Today began as any other day in Paradise. After a long run along the malecon, Bill and I headed to the pool area of our hotel. Hotel Hacienda, recommended by our cab driver, sits on the beautiful malecon in Mazatlan and our fifth floor balcony commands a sweeping ocean and beach view. It appeared that there was a Federale Police Convention going on at the hotel, as the place had many police officers staying. They were all checking out this morning. We had the pool to ourselves. We had just rinsed in the fresh waters of the cool lobby pool and were sitting on our beach chairs reading and talking when we heard about 4 popping sounds seemingly coming from the hotel lobby. Alarmed, I turned to Bill and said, “That sounds like gunfire.” Then more pops. I lept off my cabana planning to hit the pool deck, but realized I was too vulnerable and instead ran to and squatted down behind a small walled pool maintenance area. Bill squatted on the other side. The lobby staff also ran out into the ...

Yes, even seasoned travelers like us wasted two sunny days in Mexico lying around in our hotel room blowing splatter patties (my brother Kurt’s descriptive of diarrhea). Hit by the bug, but blessedly not too hard, I succumbed to drugs today, while Bill, in his wisdom, took his Imodium yesterday. Otherwise all is well. We keep pinching ourselves that we are actually (and finally) going to Sri Lanka in the New Year. However, with this good news we are realizing that we might again be adjusting to a new country with drinking water crawling with amoeba and bacteria. Oh, the joy of looking forward to that. We shall say goodbye to you all, yet again. However, George Elliot in her outstanding book, Middlemarch, hits a little too close to home when she wrote the following: “ It is certainly trying to a man’s dignity to reappear when he is not expected to do so: a first farewell has pathos in it, but to come back for a second (how about a fifth?), lends an opening to comedy, and it w...

Yes, you guessed it.  We heard today our "White Papers" have been approved by the Sri Lankan Ministry of Defence.  We are being invited to arrive in Sri Lanka alone on  December 7th or with the other  volunteers on January 10th.  We have advised CUSO we will accept the January 10th arrival date. However, we need to send our passports to Ottawa for visa stamping and we can't do that from our current location of Mexico - unless we can bilocate our passports to be in both Ottawa and Mexico at the same time.  Since we do not possess bilocation powers, we are chopping down our one month trip in Mexico to two weeks.  This allows us to fly home and mail our passports to Ottawa. There is a three week turn around for this final documentation process: sending our passports to Ottawa, having the Sri Lanka High Commission office stamp the work visa and they then, return the stamped passports ...

As you know, given the delays on our visas to Sri Lanka, we decided to go to Mexico for a month.  On Friday, November 5th, we received the following news from our advisor, Nana, in Ottawa; news which we find encouraging.   "Sri Lanka has said they will make an exception for you and bring you in-country as soon as the visa is granted – they are postponing everyone else’s arrival to January/February." We also get a sense that CUSO is increasing the urgency and pressure on Sri Lanka to get us placed, as they included in the email this correspondence,   "I’m flagging Wendy again as her placement in Sri Lanka continues to be held up by visa difficulties and we will likely lose her if we don’t find her a placement soon." T his morning, November 12th,  I received the following update from Nana, " This morning I spoke to the CD for Sri Lanka , Jane Rosegrant, who gave an update on the visa situation. For... Wendy,  we still can't be sure when the perm...

Have you ever noticed the many G words in our language associated with work, pain and torture? Grunt, groan, grind, gasp, gnarl, gnash, gruel, grasp, grip, grief, gripe, grumble, grit, grouse and grim to name a few. All these words adequately describe the second part of our bike trip. I surely used all the above words when describing our bike trip to my sister Teresa, an avid touring cyclist.  She confronted me with the following question after my tirade about the trip, " Was there anything you enjoyed about the trip?" I must admit, that I think of myself as a positive person and was confronted by her words.  Was there anything good about that adventure?  Are you kidding? We froze, fried, fought and were freaked out at times.  We were famished, fatigued, frought with anxiety and felt f $#* at times.  Are you kidding?  We decidedly, determinedly, dandily, doggedly loved it! Here is the Part Two video of our bike trip....

With ambivalence, we have left the lake. It continues to be so lovely out there: colourful leaves coating the ground, waves lapping gently at the shore and galores of mountain sheep grazing and mating. However, as we all know, the weather can change any minute, so it was time to relocate. We now reside at 976 Nicola St. Given our last eight months of rapidly displacing and relocating ourselves, we are adapting into flexible folks and so, we are now enjoying downtown living. We are close to hospital and shopping and with Bill hogging our only vehicle now, I am grateful to be able to walk to where I need to go. He denies he is hogging offering in his defence arguments that include: “You gave me a list of stuff to pick up, you needed me to fix your mom’s door, you wanted me to deliver the heater back to Shirley and Mike’s, and you wanted me to pick up stamps.” He always seems to have a clever reason to have the car. He was a lawyer. Lawyers know how to twist the facts to support their ...