Much to be thankful for don't you agree? Happy Thanksgiving Ya'll!

Since you are reading our blog - Thanks!!

On the side of our blog their is a tab called cluster maps. It is a really neat tool for seeing how we really are connected by less than 'six degrees of separation.'

If you have not visited our blog world map lately, would you check it out? We love knowing that we are reaching people around the world. Thanks to you for spreading the worldwide word.

Our world just gets smaller.

Also, if you are interested in reading about how other travelers are seeing their world check out the Lonely Planet's blogosphere at blogsherpa.com. They are publishing lots of cool travel related blogs - including ours. So, with that, this is a Thanksgiving blog.

We want to send out thanks to all of you who read, subscribe to, and share our blog. Thank you!! Special thank you shout outs to our friends who just recently started checking out our blog overseas in:

Antigua and Barbuda, Lebanon, Iran, Haiti, Djibouti, Azerbaijan, Brunei Darussalam, Maldives, Benin, Trinidad and Tobago, Bangladesh, Uganda , Oman, Jamaica, Jordan, Zambia, Libyan Arab Jamahiriya, Jersey, Timor-Leste, Chile, Estonia, Latvia, Angola... thanks for reading our blog!

We all have much to be thankful for. Happy Thanksgiving Ya'll!

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New York, New York, New York

It was a strange touchdown in New York's JFK. The shocks squeezed lower. The wheels seemed to push against the earth with an unnaturally heavy load. Our travels came screeching into the same runway from which we had lifted off to Tokyo nine month's earlier.

We are so enjoying the NYC welcome. While it feels like another stop on a long adventure, we are happy to be in familiar places and spending long, languishing warm days with family.

This morning, the two of us walked the Highline Park While there, we remembered our best suits as travelers: we feel our presence and community spirit brings us into harmony with what locals love about the places they live. We do not live in Chelsea, New York - yet we know it, feel it, understand it in the space of hours and days.

Yet, even as we relish the slow pace of long family visits, tomorrow we are back on the road. Labor Day for us means early rise to share over breakfast our newest fun travel recipe rice pudding with Indian spices.



While we are not feeling thrilled about donning our packs again and walking across the width of New York at dawn, this will be business as usual, breakfast with a lovely Aunt and Uncle, public transit and bus through four states to Boston and Salem, Mass; more visits with old friends, and round off the evening with genuine local cuisine 'steamer clams,' fresh coastal corn-on-the-cob, beers, loads of fun and laughter.

Our journey departing Beverly, Mass on Tuesday morning repeats our favorite late-Summer circuit. New York to Maine, back through the Cape and Islands (hello M.V.!!) to East Canaan, and back again. This year will also wrap up with Fall colors in Vermont. From here we will visit grandmothers and old friends. Tomorrow's journey takes us up our family pathways through Boston, onto the Atlantic Coast of New England.

At the end of the month we will celebrate Yale-in-China centennial back here in New York. After that our journey will head South, overland from Northern Vermont, through Ithaca, NY, to Columbus and Cincinnati, Ohio, to visit my parents in Berea, Kentucky, before finally making it home to New Orleans.

Around the world and a half? People ask us sometimes when our journey will end. It is a reasonable enought question. The truth is, we both look forward to settling on some piece of land and staying long enough to plant and raise crops, to grow trees, and to garden.

For now, this is not in the cards for us. After only a couple months on our beloved Gulf Coast, it will be back on the road again when we will begin traveling again back to South America, to Taganga, Colombia and our hotels El Miramar, Santa Marta and Oso Perezoso Hotel in Taganga. From Taganga, we may find our way circling through Amazon voyages or up the Rio Orinoco with our friends from Posada Don Carlos to distant villages cut off from modern devices. We do not pretend to know where all we are going.

Will we see you on the Colombia beaches next Winter? Or will our paths cross some other way? Who knows where our fates will lead us to exactly?

Keep up with us. We hope to continue to not only feed you our stories and experieces; we want to share our advice, our research, our ambitions and dedication through this blog.

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Semi-Pro travel blogger: Pro-blogging

I.

Pro-blogging. I am pro-bloggin.

On this piece of paper, I am blogging in our dear friend Martha's London flat. I am alone with a crashed computer. I have for tools a pen and a torn scrap of paper.

We have come up with all sorts of new widgets and apps in the course of tracing histories of ancient dialogues. This is what fills the empty space when the cyber has quieted. These are emerging technologies, too delicate even to reveal, which flew by in conversation too fast to write down.

We did discuss campfire apps (those which keep mosquitoes and biting insects away) - until we arrived at teenager apps (those which emit pitches from your phone to keep those between 11-21 years old away). We discussed million dollar apps for shopping and those for keeping our conversations on track. You see, we live in modernity.

Yet, I sit here a-scribbling. I am pro-bloggin.

I could bore you with our reams of data and news... it would be more noteworthy or worthwhile than this. Instead, I can take you where we have been. I am pro-bloggin (or is this proto-blogging). I am doing the type of exercise which takes place on pen and paper. And, I am reduced to pen and paper. I blame planned obsolescence.

So....our computer crashed. If you have been reading, you know this.

With a crashed computer and a race across four very historical (and yet very new to us) countries over a little less than two weeks; I am asking myself to run the last dash efforts as travel blogger. In this case, for this blog, what does it mean to lose all our travel technologies?

As I sat down and composed what thoughts defining these two words might mean to me ('travel' & 'blogger'), I came up with some formulaic answers which (a) might be of some use to our fellow travelers and blogging or blog friendly readers; and (b) I realized, yet again, that by unpacking our mission of exchange, service, exploration and discovery, I could discover deeper within myself sources of inspiration, language, and action. In the blogosphere, I realize in the actions and words of myself and others, that we are all becoming forces of combining self-interests.

Travel: involving every facet of life in relation to its other; ability to succeed; management of staying busy; preservation of health; enjoyment of self beyond (1) either self; or, (2) selected zone of self protection and/or self-awareness.

Blog: to publicly share and garner interest in travel.

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Semi-Pro travel blogger: Pro-blogging (Part Two)

II.

When my world was inverted (instead of pleasurably introverted as it is as a cyberwriter); when all that I could do from dawn to dusk and then into the wee hours of the morning was put the nose to the grindstone and achieve work, I was not alone. Everyone around me was tweeting me - or so it seemed; metaphorically. When I had adopted this pro-forma project philosophy, all I could breathe was work.

Lucky for me, I was in disaster recovery-mode. I was nurturing my resiliency, personally, socially, culturally, I was at one with the need to use physical and intellectual rigor to fight for the existence of the place where I was from (which through the work of the US Government and the natural phenomenology of hurricanes had wrought severe damage to this hometown). I...digress.

When one is caught up in one's projects, it is hard to turn off the phone.

In our modern world, the evolutions from beepers to tweeters ties us to technologies in ways which we love and absorb. Sometimes, we hate these technologies too; but, usually this sense is frowned upon or considered anti-social. So, let's assume that we love our technologies.

Anyway, when I was in the thrust of these previous epochs of my work life, I loved taking airplane flights. I used the airplane as analogy for what I encouraged my fellow disaster recovery comrades to also embrace - the retreat from 24 hour phone and message cycles.

In travel, we have so many opportunities to be something temporarily. This ambiguity speaks to the case of our modern life.

Last night, we watched a theater production of the "Prisoner of 2nd Avenue," a 1970's play by Neil Simon. It was a surprisingly hip and current rendition of times changing around those who cannot move forward. I could not place it fully in my own life. Yet, it had angst and urbanity.

At the beginning of theater and cinema, as the curtains rise, the managers they have conceived of nice ways of asking us to turn off our cellphones.

It is too bad there are not more ways of finding out how to do this. It is too bad that as a blogger I have not found better apps and widgets for helping me manage the distance between the objective to blog, write, and serve the communities at home (or those we visit on our trip), and how to enjoy the spirituality of travel once the netbook [laptop] gets sick. In previous millennia, it was your own sickness from the elements which brought you down; now, it is sickness from removal of portable media. I am unsure which illness is graver.

That said, I am off to take in more of London (camera in pocket, pen and scrap of paper in breast pocket).....

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Semi-Pro travel blogger: Pro-blogging (trois)

III.

Do we blog therefore to exist? Or, for us, is blogging an individual act of reaching out beyond mores of public acceptance (therefore being as an insidious and rebellious act)?

Is blogging the newest and least developed version of formal editorial publication?

Do we bring forth emerging concepts for a radical individualized project?

What does it mean to be a travel blogger?

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