Gary Reefs Up
I had a whole string of entries in mind for the last week's traveling, but the short form is this: After a remarkable visit to my mother's home town in Northern Texas, I started having a lot of trouble with my vehicle. After a week of struggling with it (and a cool visit to New Orleans), the engine gave up the ghost.

Luckily for me, this happened when I was in the Florida Panhandle, visiting my friend and sister-in-law Laura and my nephew Kevin. I had made it there, but leaving the next day, I didn't even make it to the next exit on the Interstate before my oil pressure started to drop. I had already spent a lot of money putting in a new oil pump in Texas, and I knew that if the pressure wasn't holding, this had to be the end.

I was able to limp to the exit and park behind a service station, then hitch-hike back to Laura's house. After lengthy consideration and commiseration we got a plan to deal with the situation, at least in the short term. The following day, Kevin came with his pick-up and we caravaned with Laura's station wagon to the place I had left the beast. There we loaded my goods into the two vehicles. (Laura is a packing goddess. She managed to get everything to fit perfectly.)

From there, Kevin headed up to the house of his dad (my brother, Ken) 175 miles away in Ozark, Alabama. Laura and I set out to move the RV. Laura has purchased 5 acres of land at the top of a hill, right of the Interstate, where she's preparing to build a home. She calls it "LauraLand".

We were able to coax the poor critter the 20 miles to her place, and that's where it sits. We'll figure out a way to sell or otherwise dispose of it in the next few weeks. Then we followed Kevin to Ken's house and had a mini-reunion with other-son Sean. We also had both Sean's and Kevin's ladyfriends, so it was a good occasion.

And that's where I am now, with a lot of miscellaneous good (including my piano) at home of my brother, sans vehicle. Not completely sure how I'll proceed from here, but gratified that this fiasco happened where I had good friends and family to help fish me out. I'm sure things will work out.

Whew!! It's been a difficult week, though!
- posted by Gary @ 10:43 PM (0) comments

 
Catching Up
It's been really hard for me to keep up my postings while traveling, so now I'm catching up with 3 postings at once. There are pictures to go with them, but they'll be a little out of order. I hope to get them ordered and add captions within a day or two.

High Plains Gothic (Dec. 11-12)
Much of the Texas 'Panhandle' (the far north part of the state that sticks up between Oklahoma and New Mexico) is occupied by a high, grass-covered tableland that extends into eastern New Mexico. In the days of the Spanish Empire, this region was known as the 'Llano Estacado', or 'Staked Plains'.

Click here for the pictures

I had heard this term over a period of years, but only recently found out what means. This area is one of the largest treeless and perfectly flat areas to be found on the planet. When the early explorers went up there, it was like going out to sea. Navigation was by dead reckoning and by the stars. The only way that paths could be established was to drive stakes into the ground, hence 'Staked Plains'. (They would have used rock cairns, but...no rocks.)

Even today, driving in this area is akin to being out on the ocean. Once you get off the main roads, you find yourself on a network of graded farm roads, nearly alone in a perfectly flat landscape, dotted here and there by tiny groups of trees that mark the locations of homesteads, about of which are abandoned. It's kind of like sailing on a calm sea with many small islands. I found it rather pleasant to cruise around this way. No worries about parking, either.

This is the land where my mother grew up. Her father, Sewell Kammerer, was one of the last generation of Western pioneers, homesteading a farm about 7 miles from the tiny town of Panhandle, Texas (30 miles northeast of Amarillo). She attended a one-room schoolhouse and generally led a life most of us only read about in history books.

It was also a life of considerable difficulty. Her mother (my maternal grandmother) died when she was only six, leaving her (the oldest) to care for a younger sister and baby brother. At a tender age, she took on the responsibilities of the woman of the house. This was also the time of the Dust Bowl, and farms such as her fathers were going under right and left. Somehow, they stuck it through.

Four years later her father remarried, to the woman we all knew as 'Grandmother Kammerer'. We were aware that Grandmother (Willie) was not our mom's original mother. But being young, we were pretty much oblivious to what that might mean. In the days before routine air travel, our grandparents on that side seemed to be pretty far away. We traveled to the farm a few times while I was growing up, and truly enjoyed our visits there. But we spent much more time with my Dadâ€s parents and a gabble of aunts, uncles, and cousins who lived a few hours drive away in Alabama. At the time, we all assumed this was just because of the distances involved.

Tragically, my mother also died (lymphoma) at the relatively early age of 54. My two brothers, my sister, and I were grown by that time, but still in our early adulthoods. We were devastated, as you might imagine. The gathering for her funeral is still the saddest memory of my life. Grandad and Grandmother flew from Texas to join us, and I remember being very touched to see them. Unknown to us, however, this marked a final split between their family and ours.

In the months and years following the funeral, we stopped hearing anything from our maternal grandparents. I heard through my sister that, somehow, we had managed to offend them terribly during the funeral gathering. It was perplexing. We really did not know what was going on or how we might have wronged them. But que sera, sera. We went on with out own lives, and only heard indirectly when our grandfather passed away in the Rio Grande Valley of South Texas where they had retired after selling the farm.

About three years ago, Willie Kammerer passed on as well, after a stroke and a lengthy coma. My sister Dottie was pulled, rather unwillingly, into going South Texas to help our aunt, Hazel Kammerer Lefler, settle affairs. While she was there, Hazel let Dottie in on a lot of illuminating information that we had been lacking up to that point.

It seems that, if all were known, our family saga might be worthy of Faulkner. When the first Mrs. Kammerer passed away, she left her three children living with a man who was very strong and caring, but who lacked many skills for raising children. Hazel remembers her life with him in that period as a tough time, with a single parent who was a stern disciplinarian and thrifty beyond the point of stinginess.

As I mentioned, my mother was thrown into the role of providing much of the basic care for her two siblings, while at the same time having to help run a farm. A very big job for a child, but she seems to have handled it well. When her father remarried, she was 16 years old, no doubt full of youthful energy and justifiably proud of the role she played in the household. Into this stepped the new wife, Willie, then just 24.

One can imagine that a teenager, especially one who had shouldered the responsibilities she had, would be unlikly to accept a step-parent unconditionally as a replacement for her original mother. Especially when the new wife is scarcely old enough to be a sister. Apparently, however, our grandfather insisted that all the children regard Willie as their real mother, and extend every deference and obedience to her.

You can imagine that tensions were high in the Kammerer household. Aunt Hazel relates that she was glad for the arrival of Willie, as she found her father pretty insufferable, but that for Ella, my mother, the situation was unbearable. From other accounts, I have heard that Willie, childless herself, also tended to see the children as rivals in some sense for her husband's affections.

In the short term, the basic resolution was for Ella to leave. My mother was quite bright, and was able to get an early admission the University of Texas in Austin, putting several hundred miles between her and the difficult situation at home. Apparently, tensions remained high, and she made few visits home during college, even for holidays.

It seems that Willie also continued to see my mother as something of the witch in the family, and when she married my father (a wonderful man) and moved with him to Atlanta, she transferred her antipathy to him, regarding him as a corrupting force of some kind and us as some sort of devil’s spawn. (I'm interpreting here, and may be overstating the case. Or maybe not.)

My grandfather really did love his children, and my mother regarded him with a respect that bordered on worship. While she was alive, Willie seemingly put on a brave front of keeping relations with our family. In truth, she seems have made efforts to reach out to us children. I still have a couple of handmade items from her (she was very handy and creative, actually) that I still treasure.

My mother's untimely death seems to have been the event that broke the spell, and I guess that, in the course of the funeral gathering, we somehow violated her ideas of how the parents of the deceased were supposed to be treated. I really do not know, but I never saw my grandparents again after that event.

Apparently, Willie had some reconsiderations later in life, and we were all surprised when we were remembered in her will. I truly regret that neither she nor we were able to close the gap while she was still alive. She was a very strong, proud, and willful person, but we did love her. But she never seemed able to show us the warmth and caring that we got from our father's mother. But I think she really did try, at least when my mom was alive.

This was the background to which I arrived in Panhandle, Texas the third week of my East-West trek, not having been there in nearly 40 years. I came to see what remained, to find the old homestead if possible, and to track down some of the information we lacked about our mother’s mother, the biological grandmother we never knew. I’ll tell you all about it in my next posting (this one is plenty long enough). Do stay tuned.

GaryInThailand, from Denton Texas

La Dolce Vida (December 5-10)
I’ve mentioned that I love the contrasts in my life. None of those could be any stronger than that of coming down out of the hills in my white-trash RV and arriving at the home of my sister, Dottie. In my family, Dottie is the big success story. She and her husband Vern now live in a small house overlooking the Rio Grande River. Small, that is, compared to the Versailles Palace. To me, it seems pretty large.

Click here for the pictures

How large? Well, when Dottie and I were standing by the front door, she got a cell phone call from Vern in the bedroom.

The home is also pretty high-tech. Where in most houses each room has a couple of fixed-function light switches on the wall, in their house each room has 8-16 pushbutton switches that can be programmed to switch, dim, or fade the lights of that room (or any other) in any combination. This may not be entirely benevolent, though. When I visited a year ago, when they had just moved in, Dottie warned me that the lights hadn’t been fully programmed and that I’d have to figure out what they did by trial and error. When I got there a year later, she told me the same thing.

Kidding aside, it is a beautiful home and Dottie and Vern are amazing people. Currently they are both top executives (he's CEO) of a very high-profile company called Eclipse Aviation (http://www.eclipseaviation.com) that is building a revolutionary jet aircraft, sort of the equivalent of an Aerostar van that flies 500 miles and hour. It's an amazing concept and company, but I don't think I can really do justice to it. Do check out the link above. If you want to buy one, though, I think they're backordered to the end of the decade.

I stayed with Dottie and Vern for four days, and there were two real high points. One was the Eclipse Christmas Party, which I had the good fortune to be in town for. As the marketing VP's brother, I had kind of an inside track socially and had a really enjoyable time meeting a lot of really bright folks. I also got a lot of mileage out of answering the question "And where are you visiting from?" Not too many folks there were in town from Thailand.

The other high point was an orgy of gift-wrapping and shipping that got most of Christmas out of the way. It's nice to have a sister with an extra guest room to turn over to the project, and I was able to get a lot of bulky items I had been carrying around since Hua Hin or Chiang Mai. What a relief.

Heading out on Monday (Dec. 8), first headed East over the mountains that bound Albuquerque, and then cut south to entire yet another world. From here, and for the next couple of hundred miles of travel, the landscape has a ghostly. As you travel, you go through a number of small to tiny town, which get further and further apart as you head east. In every town, there are a high proportion of wrecked and abandoned buildings, reflecting multiple cycles of boom and bust that have affected to region

The oldest of these cycles is that of a whole string of Pueblo Indian towns that were thriving at the time of the Spanish colonization in the early 1600s. I had actually been completely unaware that there had been Pueblo Indians this far East and South. I had always thought that the Pueblos only existed to the West of the mountains.

A visit to Salinas National Monument, a combination of three sites centered around the town of Mountainair NM, is very illuminating in this regard. At each of the three sites (Quarai, Abo, and Gran Quivira), there are enigmatic ruins of Christian churches with absolutely massive stone walls of Pueblo construction, surrounded by the ruins of Pueblo towns.

When the US government sent expeditions to this region in the 1850s, they found the remains of these town-and-church complexes and truly did not know what to make of it. They could tell the churches were Christian (and of impressive size and construction), but there was absolutely no one around who could tell them what it was about. The story had to be pieced together later.

The basic story is that these Pueblo towns, and a handful of others in the regions, had been thriving when the Spanish arrived, trading salt from several small salt lakes to the immediate East, along with pottery and other manufactured goods, with the Pueblo tribes on the other side of the mountains and with Apache nomads on the plains to the East. It seems to have been a stable arrangement for a few hundred years.

Following their established patterns of the time, the Spaniards sent Franciscan friars to convert the Indians to Christianity, along with settlers of noble pedigree who were granted tracts of land and various other rights.

The Indians seem to have been receptive to Christianity, at least in part. The friars, after all, were able to get them to build some truly impressive churches with 50-foot ceilings and stone masonry walls 6-foot thick in places. The stonework is something to behold. Conversion doesn’t seem to have been universal, though, and there are some curious anomalies, such as what appears to be a complete Pueblo-style kiva in the middle of a church complex.

Apparently there was a lot of conflict between the Franciscan friars and the secular settlers. The Franciscans clearly were sincere in what they were doing, and believed that they were there to help the Indians (whether their activities helped them in actuality is a much more ambiguous question). The landed encomienderos, on the other hand, just wanted to get rich and live well. This area did not provide many resources to exploit apart from the people themselves, and the secular Spaniards had no qualms about forcing labor from the Puebloans, although the friars tried to shield them from that.

Perhaps worst of all, the Spanish settlers turned to slaving to make money. As church wards, the Puebloans were off limits but the Apaches out on the plains were fair game. The Spanish organized regular slave-raiding parties and made the Puebloans participate. This spoiled the relations between the different Indian groups in a big way, and paved the way for disaster.

Things went to hell in a handbasket when drought hit in the 1670s, and the Puebloan crops were disrupted. At the same time, the Apaches were on the war path, royally pissed off at the Puebloans as well as the Spanish. Of course, the Indians were easier targets than the heavily-armed Spanish. As a result, the Pueblo dwellers could no longer trade or even go out of their villages safely.

After a few years, people began to starve in large numbers. Eventually, all of the remaining Indians, friars, and Spanish settlers picked up and moved to the Rio Grande Valley where the rest of the Pueblo groups lived. The entire landscape was deserted and was not repopulated (and then only slowly) for nearly 150 years.

Another, more recent, wave of population and depopulation can be observed in the scattered towns of mixed Anglo and Hispanic population in the region, particularly in Mountainair on US Route 60. Founded in the early 20th century as a railroad town, Mountainair thrived and grew during the 30s and 40s when it became known as the "Pinto Bean Capital of the World".

In the late 40s, drought hit again, and nearly all of the town's young people were forced to move away to earn a living. Today Mountainair, like most towns in this region, is a strange mix of trashed out old homes, elegant old business establishments, and newer residences that are often cheaper-style manufactured homes. It makes for a spacey ambiance.

In its heyday, one of Mountainair’s leading business leaders was a fellow named “Pop� Shaffer. Pop owned the biggest and nicest hotel in town but also a rather unusual fellow. He turned his homestead, the Rancho Bonita, into a monument to non-conformity, building several ornately (and oddly) decorated buildings and festooning the grounds with dozens and dozens of driftwood sculptures of fanciful animals.

Today, Rancho Bonita is on the National Register of Historic Landmarks. Although still occupied, the owners (presumably Shaffers) leave the gate open and clearly like to have people visit. If you are ever in this area, I strongly recommend you take the 1 mile trek off the highway to see what remains of this man’s, uh, vision.

What remains is three or four building, some of wood, some of stone, that are not quite like anything I've ever seen. I should just let the pictures speak for themselves, so click here if you haven't already to take a look at the photos that go with this posting. Pop S. left some amazing stuff behind. Reportedly, it was even more remarkable in his lifetime.

In my view, though, Pop's real legacy to Mountainair is a lively appreciation of the creative impulse. This Podunk little town has a lively arts scene, with at least two galleries featuring local artwork, and a municipally sponsored outdoor exhibit called Art Alley.

I was really glad I got the chance to visit in this region. Though off the beaten tourist track, it has a lot of interest to offer to visitors like me who enjoy learning about the back eddies and hidden corners of regional history. If you find yourself traveling in New Mexico, consider taking US Route 60 East or West, rather than the I-40 or I-10 corridors that get most of the traffic. You may find yourself well rewarded. I know I was.

Phoenix to Albuquerque, the Hard Way (December 1-4)
On Monday after Thanksgiving, I headed out from my brother's house in Phoenix to Albuquerque, New Mexico where my sister Dottie lives. Normal people do this in a day, taking the Interstate north to Flagstaff then straight east. Though seemingly longer than going directly on the diagonal, this route avoids many natural obstacles and gets you from A to B in 8 hours or so.

Click here for the pictures

I've always been curious about the terrain the Interstates avoid, and seeing as I'm traveling on a loose schedule with my house on my back, this seemed the perfect time to explore. Instead of doing it in one day, I managed to take four. It was great.

Heading East out of Phoenix, my main route was US 60. This first skirts the Superstition Wilderness, one of the most rugged places in the whole US. From there, it goes up to the mining towns of Globe and Superior, and along the spectacular canyon of the Salt River. All top-notch US Southwest desert scenery.

By the end of the first day, having gone through towns with picturesque names such as Apache Junction, and Show Low, I ended up in Springerville, Arizona for the night, and bunked into a commercial RV park.

The next day was spent in the White Mountains of Arizona, which rise to the South of Springervile. The White Mountains are not so much a mountain range as and area of high, forested plateaus. Plenty beautiful, but not quite the image the name brings to mind.

One of my purposes in this trek was to shake out the RV as an off-the-grid housing unit and as a wilderness vehicle. It worked pretty well, although I’m still shaking out some issues with my systems. I knew the generator on this boat needed work when I bought it. My water pump worked when I started, but gave up the ghost early on. Apparently, its rubber diaphragm just disintegrated from age. But the critical systems of propane heating and cooking work great. I’ve also had no problems (so far) getting the vehicle to start up and move, although it can be sluggish. You would be too, if I asked you to pull and entire household up and 8,000 mountain.

I found a gorgeous place to park and camp at the end of the 2nd day, in a grove of mixed aspen and conifer, surrounded by open grasslands. This is typical White Mountain scenery, alternating wide-open spaces with forest. The aspen trees in this particular grove were among some of the biggest I’ve ever seen, and must be truly venerable.

I spent a very enjoyable evening here, fixing myself a delicious dinner and relaxing in the light of a nearly full moon. The temperatures outside got pretty frigid (low 20s, I say. About -5 C.), but I was snug and comfortable in my mobile crib. Sweet.

The next morning I pulled up stakes at dawn and headed down the hill. In Springerville, I noticed that my RV had developed the dreaded LFS (Leaking Fluid Syndrome), dripping something green and viscous from under the engine. I knew this could be anything from trivial to disastrous, so I did the appropriate thing. I freaked out.
Actually, I was pretty calm and went looking for a garage. The first one I came to was called “Jim’s Garage�, and I knew that any place of that name was bound to set me right. Sure enough, I pulled in and left less than 45 minutes later with a new radiator hose and $42 dollars lighter. Fair enough in context.

From there, I cut South off of US 60, and then East into the Gila National Forest in New Mexico. This area is beautiful, and although it isn't as high as the White Mountains, it looks much more like mountains as we know them, with forested ridges and great views.

I found another stellar free camping place for the night, this time with a panoramic view. The evening was punctuated by three salutary events. The first was an absolutely stunning sunset, one of those that drapes the sky in fire from one side to other and takes most of an hour to complete. The next was the incredibly delicious curry I cooked for dinner. My curries are always free-form productions, and somehow on this evening everything blended just perfectly. Oh man.

The most important event of the night, however, was getting my music playback system together. I have a pair of high-end small powered monitor loudspeakers that I took as payment for a consulting job I did for Genelec a few years ago. I found that I could power these just fine from the RV’s 12-volt battery feeding an inverter that boosts it to 120 volts. I then fed the speakers from my MP3 player, which gives me access to thousands of tunes I keep on my laptop’s disk.

It kick ass. I put on the Jimi Hendrix Christmas album (tell the truth, you didn't know Jimi *had* a Christmas album, did you?) and stepped away from the RV. In the crisp air and silence, I'm sure I was audible a half-mile away.

The next morning, I finished the run, stopping to take a nice bike ride around Apache Creek, then dropping into the village of Quemado and shooting over to Pie Town to, yes, pick up a pie (pumpkin). Then I headed North and got in a sunset walk at the Malpais National Monument (basically, a huge field of solidified lava) before fueling up at Grants, New Mexico and rolling past several Indian casinos before arriving at Sis' house in Albuquerque around 9:00 pm.

All told, a very satisfying few days in my epic journey across the US, and through life in general.


- posted by Gary @ 7:20 AM (0) comments

 
Holiday Season in Arizona
I'm painfully aware that I haven't had a "real" posting (that is, an account of what I'm doing) in nearly two weeks. I can't really blame it on lack of opportunity. I've spent days parked at the brother's and my sister's houses, plugged into a high-speed link. Rather, I think it's a matter of returning to old habits and patterns since getting back to the states. My surroundings and activities are more familiar to me, so I often don't see the 'stories' in the way I do when I'm in Thailand, and I tend to prioritize my time differently as well.

I also notice that I'm not taking very many pictures, particularly of family. I spent four full days at Thanksgiving with my brother, his wife, and two daughters, but came away without a single picture of them. In Albuquerque, I've gotten exactly one shot of my sister and her husband. I sort of feel guilty about this, if only from the standpoint of what the readers from my family would like to see. But never fear, All of us are gathering in Atlanta at New Years, and I absolutely promise to get pictures of everyone. There, I feel better.

Click here to see the pictures I do have.

It actually has been a great couple of weeks. When I wrote my last post, I was camped out in Boron, California in the Mojave Desert, en route to Phoenix. The next day, I had a good drive through a lot of beautiful scenery and arrived at the house of my brother Charlie in Phoenix. The day after that was Thanksgiving, which we celebrated in the traditional way with a big dinner of turkey and dressing. My brother likes to do most of the cooking on this day, and he has some great specialties.

My brother is blessed to be surrounded by beautiful women. His wife, Kathy, is a real sweetheart, and his daughters Caitlin and Brenna (14 and 8, respectively) are real treasures. Spending time with them is always a highlight of my visits. They both are very talented and intelligent. Brenna is just beginning to show her brains and talent. I have my digital piano with me, and she insisted I give her 'lessons'. Over a two-day period, she was able to learn the complete melodies for "Summertime" and "Georgia On My Mind". Not bad for an 8-year old. I think Charlie and Kathy will probably organize some lessons for her soon.

I had promised to highlight the ritual and customs of the residents of America, in somewhat the manner that I account of my experiences in Thailand. One notable custom is the decoration of houses during the Christmas holiday season. This custom is practiced with particular enthusiasm in my brother's neighborhood (and throughout Phoenix, to be sure). This may be compensation for the lack of snow, trees, cold, and other environmental elements that are associated with the imagery of Christmas. Phoenix is in the desert, and it's generally quite mild in mid-winter.

Many people in Phoenix festoon their houses with an incredible array of lights and holiday figures. Walking around Charlie's house at night becomes a total fantasy experience. In some places, the local town governments arrange to drape the cactuses and other desert plants with lights of a single color, so that the forms are outlined. This is done rather carefully, and produces a really striking effect (sorry, no good photos of that).

All of this puts my in mind of the use of candles at Loy Krathong and other festivals in Asia. The traditional Southwest Christmas season also used candles in the form of "Luminaria", which are ordinary brown paper sacks in which a lit candle is placed along with some sand or gravel for ballast. These are arranged along walkways and the tops of walls, which is very much the way Thais use candles at festival time.

The Luminaria motif is so prevalent that it's been adopted in some architecture. If you visit the Hilton Tamaya resort in Albuquerque, for example, the entire building and it's grounds are outlined in artificial Luminaria with light bulbs. It's not the only building I've seen done this way, either.

All in all, the effect of the multi-colored Christmas lights on houses, unicolor lights on plants and structures, and real and artificial Luminarias produces a truly over-the-top effect. If you have a chance, drop into Phoenix between Thanksgiving and New Years, and make a point to drive around some of the neighborhoods and towns. You're guaranteed to see some amazing stuff.



- posted by Gary @ 11:07 PM (0) comments

 
Article on Hua Hin
The Bangkok Post, one of two English-language dailies in Thailand, has a nice article about Hua Hin in its Sunday edition.

Click here to read the article.

The article definitely highlights the upscale aspects of the place. Personally, I don't spend too much time at the Hilton, Marriott, or Sofitel. (But if you come visit, we'll go there for sure.)

There's an interesting restaurant guide included. I didn't know about some of these places, so I'll have to check it out when I get back in January. For reference $1 US = 40 Thai baht. The some places listed are on the expensive side by local standards. The rest are closer to the price structure I'm familiar with in Thailand eateries.
- posted by Gary @ 3:38 AM (0) comments

 
Frm the Mail Bag
I'm starting to get mail from readers (now I know there *are* readers!). Here's a couple of items to share.

From Bill Orner (www.orner-stepp.com), in Mountain View, California:
"Hey Gary,
Your last posting caused Blog to put the following banner ads on top:

The Wonder Cleaner
Natural & Non-Toxic cleaner and stain remover. Amazing results! Tub & Tile Cleaner
Use Bubble Up Technology to clean without choking or tearing eyes.

Pretty amazing that Blog figured this out from your posting on toilets! Looking forward to the next posting."

Me too. Personally, I think I should get money from Wonder Cleaner.


From Steven Tay, my friend from Singapore who lives in Holland now, relative to my posting on foot massage:
"Never had a foot message because everyone told me it is really painful and
they even have this variety show in Taiwan whereby the game host will go out
on the road with a massage specialist and give passerby a foot massage. And
they are suppose to either completely finish singing a song or recite a poem
while having their foot massage. And most of the time you see them screaming
away in pain and cannot complete the task. : ) They also said that if you
had a foot massage and it does not hurt or hurt much that means you have a
very healthy body! Good for you then. ; )

So looks like you are calling Thailand home now. I have always been there for
work and never play so one of this day I will come and visit you and have
you be my guide."

Thanks, Steven. Yes, I consider Thailand home, although I'm back and forth a bit now. I'm looking forward to your visit!

Keep those cards and letters coming, folks. btw, I'm Albuquerque now, after a few days camping in the mountains. I'll have a "real" posting shortly


- posted by Gary @ 1:04 AM (0) comments