Leaving on a jet plane again - Friday 13 April 2018 (Delayed post)

Somehow or other it appears I never posted this.!

Today we left Retama for three weeks in Central America taking an O.A.T. (Overseas Adventure Travel) tour called “The Route of the Maya.” Needless to say there will be more than just a couple of Mayan ruins visited, and it should be interesting to see how they compare to all the temple ruins we saw in Southeast Asia. With only five people on the pre-trip, 15 on the main trip and just five on the post trip, it should be a lot of fun.



Linda was a little bit sad about leaving her garden which was just starting to produce. She as been picking fresh zucchini and cucumbers for a while now, but her tomatoes were still green. Luckily our neighbor, Diane, is going to keep them picked off so maybe Linda will  still have some producing when we return. Just to be sure she would have some all summer long she planted more seeds before we left. You can take the girl off the farm, but you can’t take the farm out of the girl. Thank Goodness!


We are taking our usual amount of luggage, except the bags are not packed very full, and about a third of the volume is gifts we are taking to give to the school kids in remote villages we will visit. The more we travel the less we pack. At this rate in not to many years we will be down to just our day packs. Correction, I have been informed that while that may be what I take, she not only isn’t, but I will not have any access to anything she takes. Bummed Bob.


There’s more than meets the eye in this photo. While one’s eye is drawn to the beautiful young model, the story is in what is beside her. To put it bluntly, when we travel by air Linda grazes, All the time. We leave home with enough pieces of cheese, pepper slices, cheese sticks, boiled eggs, carrot sticks, cucumber slices (home grown of course), to feed a small city. And that is not counting the several dozen snack bags of her special roasted almonds She was bringing so much she couldn’t fit it all in our daypacks, so there was also a Chico Bag of food I was delegated to carry. She said something about it being a personal item. It wasn’t my personal item and it didn’t contain my personal things, but I was certainly responsible for personally carrying it. What I was alluding to at the beginning of this paragraph was how she was sitting next to the United Snack Cart. Hey, maybe she has a contract to supply snacks for the flight. Bad Bob.


It’s my Blog, so selfies are allowed. My traveling companion has one of her big million watt smiles in the photo. Fast forward an hour and a half. Coming into Houston we encountered turbulence, lots and lots of turbulence, The rock and roll, up and down kind. Big could still be used as an adjective to describe her, but the word following it would now eyed. As in BIG EYED. Linda does not like anything less than perfectly smooth when it comes to flying through the air. Looking out the window I could see the ground  below, so I turned to her and said, “The ground appears to be coming up at us about the normal speed.” I guess I’ll never understand women. You try to say something nice and comforting to them and they take the wrong way. Baffled Bob.


Our connection Houston was the usual. We always opt for a longer connection time when flying overseas, no last minute mad dash to catch the overseas flight if our flight our flight out of McAllen was delayed for some reason. As I sit at our gate in Houston, I can look up and see people, even “old people” running down the corridor hoping to catch their flight. I wish them luck, but as Linda says to me when she makes our reservations, “You may not mind running to catch a flight, but I sure do.” I like the way that woman thinks.


It was only a three hour flight to San Salvador, the capital city of El Salvador. Sitting on the side of the aircraft facing west we had some beautiful views of the sunset. The scratched window made the photos look like a poor imitation of what the spectacular sunset really was.


Our hotel for the night was on the ocean, some distance from San Salvador. Arriving after dark, there wasn’t much to be seen, so tomorrow morning will be a surprise of sorts. For now a photo of the pool outside our room will suffice.

And to end the day, a photo of our room. It is hot and sticky outside, air conditioned inside. The next three weeks are going to be interesting. With luck I will be able to write a post for each day, though it may take more than a day to write at times, just like this post, and with the hotel internet willing, will post on Saturday evening, the 14th from the hotel lobby as there is no Wi-Fi signal in our room, which is the room closest to the lobby.

One last comment, though I will try to keep the posts  free from spelling, grammatical and formatting errors, These are going to be hurried posts as in, I don’t really have time to post, but I am going to try to get one done. As the saying goes, “It is the journey and not the destination that really matters.”