Pretirement

hi, merry christmas! i hope yours was nice and you ate enough and got lots of presents. i spent mine in san diego on pacific beach. only intended to stay there two or three days but the hostel was full of people and there wasn’t going to be another decent place to spend christmas for…well i don’t know i’ve traveled a thousand miles or so since then and i’m glad i stayed.

my new austrian-bowling green friends shared a stocking with me, and the danes were next to us with a stocking made from a pair of long underwear they had left over from vancouver. the best present i got was a brazilian surfing lesson. the worst present was a piece of brazilian wax under my toenail. sneaky brazilian wax.

every sunset there was so good my heart would palpitate and i’d shout out what color everything was.

then we all left. i was shaking when we said goodbye on the bus. suddenly i didn’t want to be traveling alone.

i crossed the border at tijuana.

i slept in the hotel perla del oriente.

i bought a tourist card and a bus ticket to mazatlan.

the sunset in the sierra madres outside mexicali was as spectacular as on pacific beach, spilling out across a martian landscape, illuminating clusters of shacks here and there, only two miles from the border but so foreign i couldn’t imagine the two sights were being created by the same sun at exactly the same time. i said “pretty” to the woman sitting next to me and she nodded.

one long night, four dubbed american movies, strange mexican bus adventures, an uneventful day, a bewildering introduction to mazatlan and here i am.

One night I decided to backpack through Latin America. So on November 17 I quit my job. And on November 30 I moved out of my apartment and put my things in a 5×10 foot storage unit. My going away party was two days later (Ann took those pictures. Thanks Ann). That was about two weeks ago. For most of you, that’s the last you heard from me.

So I’m writing a blog, energized by the enthusiasm you’ve shown in keeping tabs on me while I’m away. I’m more excited about the coming year than I’ve ever been about anything, and I hope a little of that comes across, and I hope you get excited too and I hope you write and yes I hope you take the time to fly out and spend a week with me on the beach surfing in Manzanillo or hiking through the cloud forests in Costa Rica or Buenos Aires – whatever it is we’ll be doing in Buenos Aires, the reality is you won’t regret doing it for a second.

Ok sorry, I get overly enthusiastic about encouraging you to travel. Here, let’s get you up to speed on the last two weeks.

When you left me at the going away party I was staying on Andy and Farah’s couch, not sure when I was going to leave. You may have even seen me haunting Seattle for the week that followed. My last order of business was to store my car, which I did on Friday. Betsy, if you read this, yes, I was lying about having already stored my car. You probably already knew I was lying because we came to the restaurant in my car and you could see it in the parking lot from our table. I’m sorry. If it’s any consolation that was the weirdest lie I’ve ever told.

Any way now my car is in a lot in Seatac by the airport. Tom owns the lot, along with the car wash next door, and he runs a real estate business too. We signed the papers – little more than a check and a handshake – in the espresso stand that doubles as Tom’s Seatac office. Friday’s special is a free donut with your coffee. I haven’t tried the coffee so I can’t vouch for it, but your dollar couldn’t be going to a more hard working guy. After helping me tie down the car cover Tom gave me a ride back to Seattle and told me about his own adventures as a Navy man in 1970, celebrating the end of his tour in Japan by taking his young wife across Asia on the Trans-Siberian Railway, on through Europe, ending in Italy before finally flying home to Ohio.

Thanks to the ride I was able to catch the 6:00 Greyhound to San Francisco. That’s a 19-hour bus ride. Are you going to San Francisco? Fly there. If I’d booked a flight a week in advance, the ticket would have been as cheap as the bus. Oh well, it was a new experience, and the timing couldn’t have been better. We arrived in SF at 1:00 on Saturday. Matt drove up from Santa Cruz to pick me up, and he would wake me up at 9am the following Saturday and drive me to Oakland to catch a flight.

I’m not ready to talk about that week yet, if you don’t mind. If you were there, you know (and if you have pictures, please send them to me, my camera just came in the mail). To San Francisco and you guys there…wow, I just spent an hour trying to finish that sentence. You know, right? I’ll be back.

Right now I’m in LA staying with my very good friend Jessica. This is the end of the couch surfing, because tomorrow morning I’m taking the train to San Diego and checking into a hostel. I have pictures from LA but I haven’t figured out my camera and I’m going to bed.

your friend,
phil