A guest at my posada barely touched her breakfast. When I asked, she held her stomach—a familiar complaint due to strange flora in a new food chain.

“Maybe you should see the pharmacist at the end of Calle Santander,” I suggested.

“I think I need to see a doctor,” Corinna replied.

“He is a doctor.”

I didn’t see Corinna at supper. But the next morning she dove into my special crushed macadamia nut pancakes. Obviously, she was much improved. When I brought over a fresh glass of mango nectar—I always pulp and freeze a huge supply at the height of the season—she gulped it down and asked for more.

“Thanks for the referral, yesterday.” Then she giggled and shook her head. “I still can’t believe he’s a doctor. I mean his farmacia is open to the street, two steps from the constant parade of tourists and vendors.”

“Tell me what happened.”

“Well, a lady came to the counter…”

“That’s Juana, his wife.”

“She asked what I wanted. Well, I’m not used to describing my symptoms on a street corner and certainly not the state of my bowels. She just looked at me, like, ‘So out with it. What do you need a private room and a paper gown?’ So, in my best Spanish I said, ‘Could I speak to the doctor?’”

“She shrugged then yelled, ‘Hector!’”

“I looked to a corner of the shop where a short, heavy-set man in nylon shorts and a team-type jersey sat with two adolescent boys watching what must have been a televised soccer match. He levered himself out of the chair and edged his way over to me all the while looking over his shoulder at the game. He glanced up and asked what the problem was.”

“I pressed my hands on my belly.”

“He nodded once. ‘Vomiting?’”

“No.”

“‘Nausea?’”

“No.”

“‘Fever?’”

“No.”

“‘How many days?’”

“Four or five.”

“He reached into drawer and poured out ten tablets into an envelope. ‘Cipro,’ he said. Then held up two fingers. ‘Two each day.’ Then he held up five fingers, ‘Five days.’”

“From the corner of the room I heard a loud whoop and an announcer drawing out a long ‘G-O-O-A-L!’ The doctor raced back to the game. The wife rang up the sale.”

“Pretty efficient, huh?” I asked.

Corinna chuckled. “I couldn’t believe it…no appointment scheduled for three weeks from now, no insurance card, family history or co-pay. And best of all it worked like a charm.”

Retired trainer, and writing instructor, Joe Novara and his wife live in Kalamazoo, Michigan. Writings include novels, short stories, a memoir and various poems, plays, anthologies and articles. Read more at https://freefloatingstories.wordpress.com/

 

 

 

I gave over control, to Wendy the Thompson’s Tour guide for their trip into the Drakenburg mountains out of Durban South Africa. As we tooled up and around lush green mountains dotted with cattle and tourist lodges, I looked up San Cave Paintings on my iPad. One of the paintings portrayed stick-figure Bushmen-hunters attacking a cow-sized antelope—an Eland. It reminded me of football—the Xs and Os of primitive man’s playbook for winning the big game.

My wife, snuggled into the tea shop, I trailed Wendy scampering over tangled tree roots and across bridges before hop-scotching over rock-filled rills along the increasingly primitive path. I pushed myself, breathing faster and harder until we finally crested a rise in front of the cave to find a locked gate and no guide.

“Wasted effort,” I rasped.

We moved more slowly and carefully on the way down, shaking legs making it difficult to negotiate precarious footholds in the gloom of the sheltered trail. When Wendy stopped for a slug of water, I took the lead and scooted past a huge boulder into the sudden glare of a sun-strobed meadow and the shock of a wild animal watching me.

I stopped dead. Thirty yards ahead a female Eland, belly-deep in grasses, stopped grazing to return my stare. This was what the cave painters would have hunted to sustain their lives. If I were a Bushman, this is when I would have nocked my poison arrow and let fly. And if I remembered the documentary I once saw, that’s when the Bushman would have tracked the beast until it died and then would have apologized for killing it and would have expressed his gratitude for the sustenance it gave to his family. Beautiful animal. Such exquisite lines. So eminently paintable on a cave wall.

Back at the café, I locked eyes with my wife trying to recreate my experience for her. “I was in that animal.” Pleading for understanding I went on. “She was just there…in the now. And, don’t you see, that’s what eternity would be…now…always. The San saw it. They tried to grab it with paint and pictures. But I got the original.”

“Wendy, get us back to our hotel,” my wife demanded. “We got to get this guy out of the sun.”

Retired trainer, and writing instructor, Joe Novara and his wife live in Kalamazoo, Michigan. Writings include novels, short stories, a memoir and various poems, plays, anthologies and articles. Read more at https://freefloatingstories.wordpress.com/

 

Is a drive to the beach for a dip in the ocean the ultimate road trip? Yes, when it’s 5,000-miles.

Yes, when the last 400 miles are a pot-holed dirt and gravel road.

Yes, when it’s the Arctic Ocean.

Mike Lizonitz, 67, and his wife Patricia, 66, made the trip from Pennsylvania in their Kia Sedona, modified for car camping with a memory foam mattress under a homemade shelf for gear storage.

It was, Mike said, “Our last great road trip. We’ve driven to 48 states. We cruised to Alaska from Vancouver, but we’d never driven there.”
Mike said they didn’t feel their trip really began until they reached Mile Zero of the Alaskan Highway, 2,700 miles from home.

The Alaskan Highway is a 1,387-mile, two-lane blacktop, from Dawson Creek, British Columbia to Delta Junction, Alaska, near Fairbanks. Mike and Patricia car camped for $8 a night, stopped to visit Santa at the town of North Pole and left their mark at Watson Lake Signpost Forest in the Yukon.

At Fairbanks, they rented a 2017 Ford Escape specially equipped with full extra spare and donut, tool box, CB radio and medical kit for life on the Dawson Highway, the last leg. Dalton highway is a 414-mile dirt and gravel industrial road, riddled with potholes and without cell service. Facilities are spartan and spare, there are no gas stations or basic services on the last 240-mile stretch. The terminus is Deadhorse, an oil camp, at Prudhoe Bay.

Taking a day and one-half each way, Mike and Patricia spent the night, though never fully dark, at a self-serve campground sleeping in the rented Escape. The Dalton follows the Alaska Pipeline. Three quarters of the distance is forested, until the “Last Spruce. “Ahead was a vast grassland of the tundra.
Most of the traffic was semi trucks which kick up gravel, dinging windshields. They saw only two private vehicles in 400 miles. At Deadhorse they took a shuttle bus to the Arctic Ocean. Mike waded into the Arctic to his calves, while Patricia dipped her toes in.

It was a trip only 10 of 10,000 visitors who reach Fairbanks complete.

They gassed up at Deadhorse at an automated pump station, paying $5.49 a gallon. They spent $2,000 on gas for the entire trip.

They got back to Pennsylvania after traveling 9,997 miles in three weeks.

Jack Smiles is a feature correspondent for Times Shamrock Communications in Pennsylvania. He was born in 1947.

My dad used to tell me about growing up in the 1930’s when you could invite a passing stranger into your home for a meal and a night’s sleep without any concerns for your family’s safety. This same dad tried to dissuade me from going to Ecuador, warning me that there are plenty of people in the world who might be looking to hurt or kill an American woman of a certain age traveling alone.

The fact is I’ve always been a bit of a loner. I could blame that on my nomadic early life as an army brat, always the new girl in school, never really sure of where I came from or where I belonged and forever the outsider. Or perhaps it’s the selfish streak that won’t allow me to waste precious time accommodating others or compromising my agenda. It could be that it was just the practical thing to do: I wanted to go to Ecuador, so I did it.

As a new retiree, I had done a lot of reading and learned that I would get a lot of geographical and cultural bang for my buck in Ecuador as there was an amazing amount of diversity in a limited area. Several distinct indigenous peoples, the influence of Spanish colonialism, the volcanic mountains, the jungle, the beaches, Quito’s urban sprawl, and perhaps the last “undiscovered” places on earth. And the wildlife. Holy Capybara, the wildlife!

Most compelling of all was the strange cultural duality of the place. It was at once rich and poor. Straightforward and complex. Rigid and freewheeling. From the very first day, I knew I had placed myself directly in the path of some unnamed yearning that had existed for me all my life.

I’m still not sure why I wanted to go to Ecuador but what I found there was a genuine welcome by a proud people eager to show me their country and their cultures. I found insight and enlightenment. Above all, I found personal freedom and the amazing sense of peace that comes from being “off the grid” if only for a couple of weeks.

Linda Caradine is a Portland, Oregon based writer, traveler and animal lover.

You are the voice in my head

Here in Paris, John, you are with me in a new way. When I panic reading the stops as le Metro whizzes through darkness, you calm me. You tell me maybe I miscounted the number of stations before mine. And if I am going in the wrong direction, no problem, get off at the next stop and cross over to the opposite platform.

Paris was the first place we came when we began to travel “across the pond.” We never went anywhere that you didn’t figure out the public transportation from the trams and buses of Krakow to Berlin’s U-Bahn. How you loved studying maps and finding the way. I could not take this journey now had you not taught me how to travel.

You also learned the most economical way to buy tickets. I didn’t do this here in Paris and am spending twice what I should have. Forgive me. I saw the photo booths and knew they were for buying one-month passes, but I never have time. I am always hurrying from one destination to another. Life calls to me again.

I told our friends at home I was going to sit at outdoor cafes, drink lattes, and write, let Paris come to me. But you know I am not that laid-back. I have crammed in as many museums, monuments, and shops as possible. My favorite hours were spent with a new friend in a lush park off St. Germain de Pres. As a silver dusk gathered around us, we told each other the histories of our hearts, who we had loved and how we had lost them. Of course, I spoke of you.

In bed at night in a new place I long to put my face in your hair and send tiny kisses down your spine. You used to tell me to turn around so you could do the same for me. How wonderful your prickly face felt against my skin. Now you come to me in my sleep, and we are together, lovers and friends. Then I wake and lose you all over again.

Soon I will be off to Krakow, the city we discovered together, the place we loved so well. Come with me darling. Continue to be the voice in my head.

Ellen Herbert lives in Falls Church, Virginia

A man and woman from Nebraska celebrate the husband’s recent retirement by traveling to Spain. They think Spain is a unique choice over other possibilities—Caribbean cruise, tour of the Holy Land, National Parks by RV. They are somewhat surprised to arrive in Barcelona and find so many tourists and pseudo adventurers from so many parts of the world also visiting Spain. They form great herds of trudging pedestrians stampeding down Las Ramblas and shoulder-to-shoulder in the narrow labyrinthine streets of the Gothic Quarter pushed along past shops of Moroccan leather bags, jewelry from India, textiles from Persia, pastry shops, tapas bars, and paella restaurants, not to mention the recent immigrants from Syria, Africa, and Romania squatting on sidewalks and streets, vending key chains, brushes, combs, wallets, and knives on tablecloths spread over cobblestones, some standing forlorn, destitute, and disappointed.

The couple from Nebraska hold hands for the first time in years as not to get separated from each other as though holding hands might keep them both from getting lost or falling prey to gypsy tricks or refugee desperation. They follow ever-moving crowds of tourists through the ancient streets of several medieval cities, through palaces, castles, churches, and cathedrals where they are not surprised to be charged ticket fees to enter.

In the inner gardens of the Royal Alcázar in Seville they deliberate over taking the time and energy to walk into the labyrinth of cypress hedge some sultan seven hundred years ago ordered built for meditation for the mind and exercise for the body. It remains intact, maintained, trimmed and pruned all these years even as the rulers and religions change. They waiver indecisive for long moments over whether to enter the labyrinth or not.

From outside the paths between the tall cypress hedge, the intricate course of walkways can’t be seen. They see curious expressions on the faces of tourists coming out of the labyrinth and don’t know how long they might have wandered or lingered inside. There is laughter from children chasing and hiding from each other inside, but the laughter eventually stops.

The man from Nebraska is already tired from the hour they stood in line before buying tickets to enter Seville’s spectacular cathedral where they roamed for two hours following audio explanations through headphones. There had been another line for an hour outside the Alcázar so the husband is weary of going inside the labyrinth, this maze whose meaning and purpose he neither cares to enter nor understands.

The wife, however, insists, and pushes her husband, like she so often does, to do things he is reluctant to do and go places he is reluctant to go. This causes a begrudging silence between them as the wife takes her husband’s hand and leads him into the Sultan’s garden labyrinth; and the husband, once inside, releases his wife’s hand and all the accumulated dread and fear unfold.

James Miller Robinson is from from Huntsville, Alabama