Dos dias

Only two days to go! Our apartment is almost empty, we dropped off an entire truckload of stuff off at Goodwill yesterday, and a bunch of stuff in storage today (Thank you Elizabeth, you rock!). We've still got a lot of tedious work to cram into the next two days, but I think we'll make it... Stay tuned to find out...
We've got a few places in Panama lined up, we can't wait! We're starting out by spending a couple of nights in Panama city (Hotel Marparaiso), then we're moving on to El Valle. It's a small town in the crater of an extinct volcano. It looks like we'll be visiting the family of one of our Portland friends there. And we found a really fun looking hostel near Boquete and David called "The Lost and Found". Then we'll be moving on to Costa Rica to visit our friends at Verdenergia.
We'll be trying to get a couple more posts up before we go. We'll see...

Dos Semanas -Two Weeks

Two weeks?! We've been sooo busy. We've got our passports and are almost done with immunizations.

Mike did his last Science Museum set up, which was putting together dinosaurs.


Check out our new Flickr account where we'll be posting photos of our adventures. Right now there are a few dozen pictures of the dinosaur setup.

2 Years and Running Pt. 8 -Memphis Blues

I used to struggle with finishing songs. I suppose I finished about 2 out of every 10 songs I started to write, but the last few years the problem has been keeping a hold of the songs I do write. I've probably forgotten as many tunes over the past 5 years as I remember. This journal is helping to some degree.

'Memphis Blues' is one that almost fell by the wayside -I found it in my journal and worked it up a bit after my show yesterday. My apologies to anyone who thinks the performance quality of the recording isn't up to snuff, but this weblog is more for me to keep track of my life than anything else.

Last year when I was on tour with Dark Skies, I got off the tour in Memphis with a cracked rib and some business issues back home. I wrote a bit about it back in April of '06 in a post called Tour End...

I sat in that waiting room for 8 or so hours, there was a horrible, apocalyptic storm going on outside and emergency news reports cut into the sitcoms on the TV bolted to the wall. At least 12 people got washed away by that storm, but judging from some of the people sitting around me waiting for hours in an 'emergency room' I couldn't help but find a slight comfort in the fact that someday everyone's suffering comes to an end...

I got some X-rays and went back to see the doctor in a room that was so disgusting I was afraid to touch anything (and the doctor wasn't touching anything either -including me thankfully). So after that I ended up waiting another 12 hours at the Memphis airport waiting for my flight out.

So, sleep deprived and in pain, I wrote this tune while sitting up on the second floor waiting for security to come and tell me not to play my harmonica. It's surprising how easy it is to write a blues tune when I'm in that state of mind.

Memphis

Synchronicity...

Interesting coincidences keep happening with our trip to Central America. Last night we went to see Joe Mac's band 'Dark Skies' (See March and April '06) at Audiocinema, down in the warehouse district. Great show by the way.

Anyway, it had been several months since we've gotten together, so we did some catching up. It turns out that Joe's going to be in Costa Rica at the same time we're going to be there! We're going to meet up and spend a week or two traveling together. It's pretty strange... everything that happens seems to just reinforce the fact that this is exactly what we should be doing.

2 Years and Running -Pt. 6 Cinco Meses (5 months)

Less than 5 months to go before our big trip to Central America. It's been close to 6 months since we decided to go, and it's going by fast.

Why did we decide to go to Central America? A whole slew of reasons. It's relatively close, relatively cheap, and relatively safe. We want to learn Spanish, and what better way to do it? Willie is at the age right now where he needs to see more of the world than this little 2 mile square area of the city and whatever attractions there are on the freeway between Oregon and Arizona. We know that there are other, healthier ways of living (for ourselves and the planet) than we know right now, and we want to learn more about them. It turns out that there are many farms and eco-villages in Central America, that will let us stay with them for free in exchange for working on various projects.

Some people think we should be afraid of spending several months in Central America, that it's somehow risky. What a joke...I almost get hit on my bike by some dumb$%#@ on a daily basis, and I've talked to more people than I can count on my fingers and toes who've been down there, and not one of them has told me a horror story. The worst that people can come up with -'you have to be as careful in the cities as you would be in any major U.S. city.' The State Department says we should avoid college campuses...that's where the politically active people are...wouldn't want to go anywhere near that!

We'll be learning and helping out in green-building in Panama and Costa Rica, farming and teaching children in Nicaragua, checking out weaving communities in Guatemala (one of which makes guitar straps for Artichoke Music), visiting coffee plantations and artisan communities in El Salvador. We'll also be meeting Samantha's mother in Beliz and checking out Mayan ruins and getting involved with a former college geography instructor's non-profit. That's only a partial list. And I am making a project of audio recording musicians all along our journey. We're already wondering if the 3 months we had planned on will be enough time. Especially because most places want us to stay at least 2 weeks. And we're reserving the option of staying as long as we want. You never know, our skill set may be of much more value down there than where we are now -many places are specifically looking for musicians, artist and people who can build websites. And brewers!

The picture at the top is of a place we'll be staying in Costa Rica -'Verdenergia' (www.verdenergia.org). It turns out that some of the people who live there have a connection with Portland and are visiting right now! We're having dinner with them tonight, and are going to stay with them for probably close to a month, helping in the garden, building, brewing, teaching, learning...we might help them build their website as well.