Having finished our time on the motorized yacht Eric, our home for the last week, we're just laying around with the local sea lions at the beautiful waterfront park on San Cristobal Island. Our flight back to Quito departs shortly. More details, including sea sickness horror stories, coming soon.
Okay, we're back in Quito for the night, let's try this blog post again.
On Thursday morning we met up with Guillermo Valencia a local driver/guide recommended by our hotel. He did a great job of narrating the landscape of Quito - physical, political and otherwise - as he took us out toward Mindo. We stopped along the way to stand on the equator (Chris tried to balance an egg on a nail and failed, Kelly successfully verified that water swirls in different directions on different sides of the line, etc.), and to take in some stunning views of craters and volcanoes amid the lush jungles.
This WAS a fairly detailed post about the amazing experiences Kelly and I have had the last few days in the cloud forests of Mindo, but the internet connection and computer in this Internet cafe were flaky enough that this update is now gone, and this very short update will have to suffice. We´re about to get on a bus back to Quito (two and a half hours on winding dirt roads in the mountains - wish us luck!) and then tomorrow we´re off to the Galapagos. I´ll try to recreate the longer post later tonight if time allows.
We´re having a great time. More soon.
After a very long day of travel, we're in our cute little hotel in Quito. Flights all went fine, despite being an hour late arriving in Atlanta. Giving every passenger their own personal entertainment center on the seat back in front of you certainly calms the masses and makes long hours in a seat more bearable - hey, I finally got to see Avatar. The most harrowing part of the day was the 10 minute cab ride from the airport here - yikes.
We're thankful for safe travel, a nice bed, and the adventures ahead! Thanks for reading.
Chris and Kelly have slightly different approaches to packing for international travel.
Kelly is an experienced international traveler, which means that she will probably casually throw a few things in a bag as we walk out the door to go to the airport. Somehow everything will just fit fine in her luggage and everything she needs will be there or will be magically brought to her by travel fairies along the way.
I, on the other hand, haven't traveled much outside the country in a while, and that in combination with my general engineering approach to life's challenges means that I've been planning my packing for a while in advance of this trip. Like, weeks and months. Like, I have a room in my house dedicated to the arrangement and assembly of my trip stuff.
If you've visited Richmond, Indiana via interstate 70 recently, it's likely you've seen a new addition to our most prominent landmarks: a 110-foot vinyl-sided cross right next to the highway exit on our east side. The cross was erected at a cost of US$150,000 by New Creations Chapel, Inc., which has a website dedicated to the project's history and progress. Their hope is that it "will give hope, direction, light from above, and encouragement to all those people traveling Interstate 70 and passing New Creations Chapel."
Richmond already has a number of issues with public perception when it comes to tourism and first impressions. All discussions of religion and symbology aside, I think this new fixture probably doesn't help with that. But the main question that came up in the casual discussions I've had with people about it is "how does such a thing go up without the community having any input on it?" To answer that question I contacted Scott Zimmerman, who works as a City Planner with the City of Richmond.
Here's what he had to say: Continue reading "Richmond Indiana's Eastern Cross"
Last night I got to experience Richmond as a kind of tourist, and I really enjoyed it. I was hosting cross-country cyclist Ben Lyon at my house through a Warmshowers.org connection, and he came into town ready to hang out and see some sights. We ended up gathered with Aaron, Mark and Thomas on my front porch to hear about Ben's trip so far, and then set out on our bikes for dinner. Continue reading "Velotraverse"
This past week I had my first experience hosting some cross-country cyclists for a night. Quinn, Ken and Andy are biking from Portland, OR to New York, NY and came through Indiana, riding into Richmond on US-40. I recently became the sole human occupant of a house with great space for hosting guests, and so I figured the least I could do is sign up for some opportunities to help out folks who find themselves on interesting journeys through the area.
WarmShowers.org is a resource for facilitating just that for cyclists, and it's a great way to find or offer lodging. You can provide as much or as little information about your location and "amenities" as you want, and you're under no obligation to host anyone at any particular time. It's similar to other resources like CouchSurfing.org or even Mennonite Your Way.
At a recent training I attended, some foofaraw was made about the fact that the facilitators had come all the way from Boulder, Colorado to Indiana to share their knowledge and expertise with us. Those facilitators in turn made some note of the fact that their knowledge and expertise was derived from their own trip to meet with others at a training in the UK, and from some other journeys that they'd taken involving significant travel.
Around the same time I noted a historical reference to a 1959 headline in the Earlhamite, "Southern religious leader visits Earlham." It was about a then only mildly well known Martin Luther King, Jr. visiting the College and speaking at the Meetinghouse there. Being a religious leader from the South surely had different connotations then than it does now, but I was still struck by the headline's focus on the origin and destination of the speaker, less on his message or credentials.
Ever since, I've been thinking about the role that travel plays in establishing credibility and expertise for someone when they come to speak or teach on a given topic.
Continue reading "The role of travel in establishing expertise"
