Our first stop yesterday was the San Antonio Japanese Tea Garden. My view of gardens is that they are OK when done in moderation. This garden is different. Walking into the garden was like walking into Shangra La. It was stunning. They converted a stone quary to a garden, which sounds prosaic. But the way they did it was astonishing. We had to stop and just take it in before walking around. It helped that we arrived early. The garden opens at 7 AM. We had the place to ourselves, which enhanced the feelings of peace and tranquility. And this was the effect in the winter, when much of the vegitation was brown. The pictures of gardens I take never represent what I see in the garden. I’ll leave the pictures to thse who want to visit the website.

From there, we went to the Witte museum. I expected this to be a typical science museum, but it was much better than that. They focused on telling the stories of inhabitants in Texas, from the dinosaurs to the 1850s. In this case, “inhabitants” includes wildlife and plant life — in other words, ecology. I thought the dinosaur exhibit was typical of what one would see in any other museum. But the rest of the presentation was first class. We spent several hours learning about the five ecology zones in Texas as well as human inhabitants, both ancient and modern.

Before leaving San Antonio, I can’t help but ask the purpose of this sign. It doesn’t seem to give pedestrians the right-of-way to cross the street. It doesn’t signal motorists to stop or even yield. But it did turn on flashing lights and we did survive the crossings.

After that it was time to leave San Antonio and move on to the dude ranch. We survived our first horse ride, had a Texas cowboy dinner, followed by a campfire. Pictures are on the website.

We had three perfect experiences in one day. Does that make a vacation trifects?

I hope this finds everybody doing well.

We spent a couple of days in San Anton, home of the Alamo. I visited the Alamo many years ago and was not impressed. Several people warned us not to get our hopes up. However, the Alamo turned out to be the best part of our visit. The key was the guided tour. We learned a lot about the history of San Antonio which, of course, include the battle of the Alamo. I won’t go into the many misconceptions most of us have about the Alamo, but I will say that many of the “facts” I knew about the Alamo were just wrong.

The Alamo was just one of five missions in the San Antonio area. All but the Alamo have active Catholic churches today. Our second most interesting activity was visiting the San Jose mission, which focused on the history of the indigenous people. We enjoyed going to mass at San Fernando Cathedral. founded in 1731, the stone cathedral is immaculate.

We also managed to do visit many other tourist attractions, including the world famous River Walk. My personal favorite totally irrelevant tourist object was Colonel Crockett’s Crooked Conestoga (our name for the period piece outside the Crocket hotel).

I hope this finds everybody doing well.

We’ve spent the last few days with Rick and Suzy. Mainly, we’ve been eating extremely well. But we managed to do a few other things also. In Galveston, we visited the Moody Mansion. Moody was one of the wealthiest people in the US in the late 19th century. The family held onto their businesses, wealth, and house through the 1950s. The family lived a low-key life style for people in their economic bracket, but they had all the comforts … a state-of-the-art intercom system, a first-class Victrola, and even a radio. If you visit the website, you can see a few pictures. The house was built in the late 1800s. There was already an electric power plant on the island. The house was fitted with electricity from it’s initial construction.

A trip to Houston would never be complete without a visit to the San Jacinto battleground, Of course I knew the Texans lost the battle at the Alamo. I knew they also lost several other battles. And I knew that Santa Anna had the habit of taking no prisoners, it being easier to just kill all the survivors. What I didn’t know was that Texans won the war and their independence with the only battle they won. The key was that they not only decisively won the batte, but they also captured Santa Anna. It seems Santa Anna didn’t want the Texans to follow his example of killing all the survivors, and was willing to cede Texas their independance in exchange for his life.

There are many cool stories about the monument. Here is one. It was politically important that this monument not be taller than the Washington monument in DC. After several surveys and studies, they decided the proper “zero level” from which the monument’s height is measured should be 15 feet above ground level. Presto! The Washington monument is taller.

Another fascenating trip was a boat ride through the Houston port. The Houston port is the largest in the US by several measures. Seeing the ships, refineries, and other plants from the river was fascenating. On the website, you will see a picture of an orange boat on a freighter. This is the only lifeboat for the ship. Ships are so automated the entire crew can fit in this one lifeboat. The most common use for lifeboats is to escape from pirates. Once the captian soulds the “abandon ship” signal, the crew have 5 mintes to get themselves in the lifeboat. After that the door is sealed, the release triggered, and everybody on the lifeboat gets a very fast and intense trip away from the freighter and into the surrounding ocean.

You might have heard about the ice storm and power failures in Texas. These are in the Austin area. Our next stop is San Antonio. We won’t be in Austin until Feb 8. They should have everything patched up by then.

I hope this finds everybody doing well.

For you young’ins, the title is a take-off of Edwin Star’s 1970 song about war. Fortunately, Covid is no where nearly as bad as war, at least for us. When I got my cold, I took a Covid test. It came up negative. My symptoms were pretty strong when I tested, so I assumed I didn’t have Covid. When I took the follow-up test, it came up positive. The directions say to wait 15 minutes and look really close for the second line. My came up loud and clear in less than one minute. If the results were an audible bong, the noise would have knocked my socks off. Danita also tested positive. I’m over my symptoms. Danita’s symptoms are mild enough that she had a healthy apatite for breakfast. We are supposed to isolate through Wednesday.

We are well positioned for our isolation. We were able to extend our stay at the Baton Rouge Embassy Suites for our last two isolation days. We have a suite with a door between the bedroom and living room. We have three sinks. The hotel breakfast has good foods including a make-your-own omelet station. The room rate is reasonable. There are plenty of stores, restaurants, and services near by. (We selected Doc’s wash, dry, and fold.) The internet service is solid.

Can one cruise without getting Covid? My symptoms started in the evening of our disembarkation day. The last two days of the cruise were sea days. There’s not much doubt that we got the “dam” variant of Covid. (All Holland America ship names end with “dam”.) We took extreme precautions. We got our fall bivalent Covid booster along with our flu shots. We wore KN-95 masks whenever we were in public areas indoors. Sometimes we wore masks while outside due to the size of the crowd. We ate all of our meals at our own separate table (to the dismay of the seating staff). However, life is life. It’s all part of the adventure.

Isolation isn’t forever. We’ll be heading over to Rick’s and Suzy’s to continue our adventure Wednesday afternoon.

Yesterday we drove through 4 states — Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana. Our main goal was to get to Baton Rouge, but we made a couple of stops to break up the drive. The better stop was at the National Wildlife Refuge in Mississippi. This is the only place where Sandhill Cranes live. When the wildlife refuge was created m there were only 30 Sandhill cranes. Today there are more than 150. We learned a lot about Sandhill cranes and this savanna habitat.

When we got to our hotel, I was feeling better but Danita had caught my cold. By 7:30 last night we were both asleep. I’m almost back to normal but Danita has a fever. We planned to be in Baton Rouge two days. We might spend most of that time recuperating.

We drove to a museum in Tallahassee. They had indigenous wild animals, barn yard animals, and antebellum buildings. I didn’t take any pictures because I was shaking from being cold. From there we drove to our hotel in Pensacola.

Hopefully I’ll feel better tomorrow. In the mean time, we’re doing carry out dinners.

I hope this finds everybody doing well.

We had extra time today and decided to us it visiting the hard core tourist area (where every admission to each building needs a different (expensive) ticket. It was fun and we learned stuff, but the fort was the better visit for me. We drove to Lake City, FL. I got a cough, then aches, then the shivers. Danita and I practically had masks glued to our faces thee whole time. Fortunately, the first COVID test was negative. Here’s hoping. And here’s a few pics on the web site. Plus two pics below specifically for Ryn.

I hope this finds everybody doing well.

St. Augustine is the oldest city in the US (I think I have the correct modifiers here.) According to one local, if you arrive at the historic district when school is out, the place is mobbed. It’s impossible to drive. There’s a large parking area on the outskirts. We arrived when the area “isn’t busy”. We stopped at Castillo de San Marcos and found cars literally crawling around the parking area looking for the opportunity to spend $10 on a parking space.

It was an easy drive up I-95 but long. It takes 4.5 hours to do the drive, but of course we have to stop. One stop was for a car wash. After being parked under a tree for 21 days, the car was so filthy we didn’t want to touch it. But all is well. We found a great car wash. The weather cooperated. Traffic was a little heavy at times but overall it wasn’t bad. The fort is quite nice. We heard an excellent presentation about the weapons of the day and how they were used to attack and defend a fort. We also learned the origin of several common sayings, including “lock stock and barrel”, “flash in the pan”, and “going off half cocked”. We decided not to visit the “million lights” exhibit because we were tired from the long drive, plus there’s a good chance of rain this evening.

Our hotel is right next to the historic area visitor center. Tomorrow we’ll have breakfast at “Schmagel’s Bagels”, then visit a few more attractions around here. Then we’ll head north, turning left at Jacksonville and starting our way across the Florida panhandle.

There are a few pics on the website. I hope this finds everybody doing well.

After taking a ride on the sugar cane train, we are leaving St. Kits. This marks the end of this part of our adventure. We have two sea days before we disembark.

One of the “challenges” I never figured out was ship time. The captain would announce moving the ship’s clock an hour one way or another. Our phones and computers would use its GPS to figure out what time zone we were in and automatically adjust themselves to the correct time. There was usually an hour’s disagreement between the ship/island time and our phone time. There was usually 5 hours difference to the computer times because our internet access was funneled through England. I suppose there’s an app for that.

I hope this finds everybody doing well.

Yesterday we took a self-guided walking tour of Barbados, which was nice but not noteworthy. Today we took a tour in St. Lucia. We ate cassava bread with banana catsup, mango jam, and nutmeg jam. We also heard many interesting stories about St. Lucia, some of them true ;-). This was the first day we had any rain at all. The rain was quite heavy for a while. Fortunately, we were under cover stuffing cassava bread in our faces. I put some pictures in the website, if you are interested.

The big mystery is the man who left the cruise yesterday. There are lots of staff all over the ship. I always assumed some of them were security. But Danita saw a real security person, with a large “Security” on their shirt and obviously carrying a gun escort a man about my age off the ship. This was the first time either of us saw a cruise person with an obvious security badge or anybody carrying a weapon of any kind. Not long afterwards, as we exited the ship for our daily walk, we saw the local police with a man about my age sitting in the back seat of the police car leaving the terminal area. So far as we could tell, the man didn’t even have his luggage. Very few people knew what was going on. We couldn’t find any scuttlebutt. I’m pretty sure our room steward knew about it, but he wasn’t talking. I don’t normally think that men my age who have the money to take a cruise would do anything that would merit expulsion in mid-cruise. This appears to be a story that will never be told.

I hope this finds everybody doing well.