Well, dear readers, after being gone for a week on a family vacation, I’m now leaving in the wee morning hours–in six hours, to be precise–on a mission trip to Juarez, Mexico. It’s an annual thing our church does, and this year I decided to go as one of the adult volunteers. It’s really a mission trip for the youth of the church, with something around a 65-35 breakdown of youth to adults.
Normally the trip is to build simple homes for the poor of the area, but this year we’ve been asked by the mission sponsor, Amor Ministries, to build some duplex housing for attendees of the local Bible college.
So you won’t be seeing any updates from the phisch bowl for a bit, as we will have little power available, little running water (which we don’t drink any way, we bring our own drinking water), and absolutely no Internet access of any kind. Mobile phone coverage is even spotty, and insanely expensive.
It’s going to be a blast.
See you next week.
Tag: travel
So while browsing on Flickr, I came across a link to Douwe Osinga’s Visited States. It’s pretty simple: you click on the name of the state you’ve visited, and the state gets marked in red on the map. I’ve visited half the states in the Union:
I have some personal criteria for what constitutes a “visit”. For instance, I didn’t count the layover in Salt Lake City as a visit to Utah. I don’t think you can really call it a visit when you never leave the airport. Likewise, I didn’t count the short time I spent in Newark, leaving from the airport to go in to Manhattan, as a visit to Jersey. I don’t count the approximately two hours I spent at a friend’s father-in-law’s place in Oklahoma as a visit; we were there to pick up dad-in-law’s old big-screen television, and it was right back across the border in to Texas.
However, though we didn’t spend a night in Maine, or Vermont, I count those as states visited, since we were there to see certain sites unique to the state, i.e., playing tourist. So you may feel otherwise as to what makes a “visit”, but that’s some of what I thought about when marking states.
So how many have you visited?
500 points to the member of the Stevenson family who can correctly identify the movie from which the above quote comes, and the character/actor who said it.
I ususally don’t go for Internet memes, and Tom didn’t ping me with this one, but I thought it pretty cool nonetheless. How many public transportation systems have you ridden? Below are mine:
Update, 11:00 PM: My wife notes that New Orleans’ RTA isn’t on the list. I thought maybe because RTA didn’t include some form of light rail that it failed to qualify, but then she reminded me that it has the trolleys, like San Fran’s MUNI. So even though there’s no icon for it, you can add New Orleans to my list.
Earlier this evening, I booked a round-trip flight, on American Airlines, from Baton Rouge to DFW for my grandmother. It’s for the first weekend in August, to celebrate my son’s birthday.
Initially, I was looking at mid-morning flights out of Baton Rouge on Saturday, August 5th, and a mid-afternoon return flight from DFW on Tuesday, August 8th. I found great times for each, but the total ticket, even with a supposed senior discount, was $361, after applicable taxes and fees.
I changed the flight out of Baton Rouge to Friday, August 4th, same time of the day, and the price dropped to $260.
So apparently the new savings comes in with the Friday stay-over…
I’m on vacation on the Garden Isle of Kaua’i, Hawai’i, right now, so posts will be few and far between. I’ll try to get a few pics up here and there, but don’t hold your breath. 🙂