tbaroundtheworld

The National Audubon Christmas Bird Count has been conducted year every since 1900 and we’ve been covering San Carlos, Sonora, Mexico without interruption since 1993. Our December vacation on the beach has always been loosely based on the count with a lot of time dedicated to wandering around the environs looking for birds. And the area provides some interesting ones, species that are local and a whole host of visitors that has traveled from the Arctic and my back yard. Each fall, western North America is abandoned in favor of a little time down by the ocean where the temperatures are mild and the food supply less marginal. There are even some that “reverse migrate”, leaving homes in the rainforests of Panama to spend the winter where the Sonoran Desert falls into the ocean. We’ve seen a lot of changes over the years – from the first count where Isla Blanca, a mile off shore, would start bare close to sunset and end up covered from one end to the other with a standing room only party o...

The drive from Albuquerque to Tucson initially follows El Camino Real; the Royal Road of the colonies of Spain that stretched from the Valley of Mexico north to the southern part of what is now Colorado. First traveled in 1598 it extended Spain’s New World holdings far to the north, but unlike the wealth that was generated by Mexico, little came from that expansion. There was nothing to be found then along this route and today there is little more than Indian casinos, alfalfa farms, half empty reservoirs and a stark beauty that truly reaches its pinnacle in slanted winter light. Food is a big part of every trip I take. On planes it boils down to the class I’m sitting in; Business is a nice filet mignon and Economy is a sad little salty pile of chicken and noodles. In our car though we have mastered the art of eating on the go, and this is in no small part due to the fact that My Lovely Wife also carries the appellation of Sandwich Queen. We even have a food preparation kit in the door ...

When I was a little boy my father used to take me downtown every August to do a little clothes shopping before school began. His favorite store was called “The National” and it was one of the fancier shopping options in Rochester. It was housed in a big gray stone building that stood on the corner of Main and Stone, just up the block from where my dad held a second job parking cars. I used to love those trips because they generally ended with a hot dog and a chocolate malted from the small café on the first floor of Sibley’s, the pre-eminent department store in town which was across the street and up a block. These were the days when the bigger stores had been in business for generations, owned by families that had begun as “dry good merchants” in the early history of the city. Sibley’s was one of those, but to me it didn’t matter, Sibley’s was all about hot dogs and malts. At the time stores like The National offered “revolving credit accounts” as the concept of using a piece of plast...

You can only sit around an airport eating Kit Kats and drinking Cokes for so long before you start going a bit stir crazy. I can do it for a couple of hours, but five or more seems like an eternity. When you’re traveling you begin your day with a pre-conceived notion of how the time will flow – where you’ll be, what your transfers look like and which part of the time block you’ll spend sitting on the plane. In the past it used to be all about what time I arrived. Lately, with the travel I’ve been doing, it’s more about whether I’ll arrive at all. While airport terminals are very busy places there really isn’t much of anything interesting happening. All the activity and motion that sometimes appears dizzying is really nothing more than people rushing here and there. And aside from that ever enjoyable pastime of analyzing the appearance of one’s fellow travelers, nothing of much interest comes from the movement of people. Unless someone falls down or walks into a pillar or something. The...

I’m think I may have found an even more gut wrenching set of words than the traditional, “We need to talk” that haunts our collective memories. My latest candidate is, “Good morning sir, I am sorry to tell you that your 13:40 flight will now be departing at 17:00. Please read this memo for details.” Couple that with the fact that it’s 9:25 and you’re not traveling alone and I think you’ll agree – my phrase is just as bad if not worse. All week long I was worried that I was going to have a hard time getting out of Dalian. Our pea soup fog didn’t seem to want to go away and from what I’d heard my first stop, Beijing, was even worse. I had friends who left on Wednesday morning who had to do a diving catch at the airport and divert to Seoul because the Beijing route was closed. So when the temperature dropped 20 degrees and the wind picked up on Wednesday night, I crossed my fingers and hoped that it was a good sign. And it was; Thursday came in and went out with the same weather and when ...

We seem to be in a foggy weather pattern these past few days. I don’t mind it that much, but it makes the driving a bit scarier and as I get closer to my next trip home it makes my nerves a bit edgy. You see, when I get close I don’t want trivial things like weather to get in my way; I want to go, and the daily closure of the airport and the skein of cancelled flights weren’t putting my mind at ease. In spite of the soup we took a trip into town last night for dinner at a friend’s house. The promise of home cooked Sichuan was all it took to inspire me to make the drive in the zero visibility soup. It’s a weird thing to be motoring along on an essentially abandoned elevated highway when the only things you can see are the decorative lights on the concrete barriers. This was the new road into town, the one I’d actually seen built and which I’d hoped to try one of these days despite having no idea where it went. Jiang knew though and he told me it was generally empty because they’d set th...

It occurred to me tonight that I might have lost most favored patron status at Starbucks. I ended up there following a quick trip to the department store to collect a bottle of wine for a dinner invitation (tomorrow night) and a box of grape juice to get me through the rest of the week. I’m down to one last liter of Blutorange and I hate to open it knowing full well that whatever is left behind will almost certainly not survive the 5 weeks I am about to spend in the US. And given that to me it’s a treasured resource, I’m not about to sacrifice the lion’s share for a single glass on Friday morning. So out I went to pick up those items and to have an iced Americano. The traffic for tonight’s commute was absolutely horrid, a combination of an uncountable number of company owned commuter buses hogging the center lane, a single dead car and the normal amount of crazy Chinese driving. It was tough too because I had a passenger and so I was unable to spend any time talking to Jiang. He dealt ...

Unlike a regular US Thanksgiving, our Chinese version turned out to be a moveable feast and a pretty full weekend to boot. A day of work after our great expat evening out led to a night of music and Sichuan cuisine. I had plans to attend the most recent installment at the Kai Fa Qu theatre, a string group by the name of Trio Broz. According to the musician’s biography, they are specialists in arrangements of Bach’s Goldberg Variations, which I thought sounded pretty intriguing. When my regular music companions were laid low with what seems to be getting everyone around here I made plans with some other friends to pick up tickets and for them to collect me about a half hour before the concert for the short ride down the road. Normally I’d walk, but we were in the middle of a wind enhanced deep freeze so I though a ride might be in order. As it turned out I would have been better off on foot since standing in place outside your building in the sub zero temperatures and a roaring wind whi...

Tonight was my second Thanksgiving in China and it made me think about how that had come to be. Last year Thanksgiving fell about a week after I’d arrived, and it was the topic of one of my first serious essays telling the story of my China adventure. I remember that I was just getting my feet on the ground and making the transition from the natural born isolated, anti-social me to the expat me, one with friends and a social calendar. I debated at the time whether or not going to someone’s house, a co-worker to boot for such a traditional holiday was something that I really wanted to do. But at the urging of My Lovely Wife I decided to do it and so I arming myself with 4 or 5 bottles of wine and a big bouquet of flowers for the lady of the house and off I went. As it turned out, I had to be the “dad”, the carver of the turkey and the organizer of the dinner because no one else there had ever filled that role. And I had a great time; it was a true family day and just what I needed at th...