Random thoughts on a ferry ride

Jan 4 – ferry back to La Ceiba

On my first solo trip to Europe, I got road-weary after about a week or so. During my extended, experimental solo trip to Nicaragua last year, it was about three weeks or so. Tomorrow marks three weeks on the road on this long journey – and I don’t feel road-weary at all. Perhaps it is all the movement or perhaps it is that I’ve spent about half the time so far with friends that I already knew.

I am curious when that point will come on this trip, because it most certainly will come multiple times. Is it like the wall that runners hit when running long distances? When I push through it, will it provide some equal euphoria to what they experience?
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And why is the phrase that someone “waxes lyrically?” I appreciate the sentiment – and I hope to have moments where my prose is described in such a fashion – but if you are writing something that is sad or depressing, shouldn’t the phrase be “waning lyrically?”
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There are some words that only seem appropriate in certain parts of the world. I’m going to have to keep a list of them, as I think of them on this route, but two of them came to mind in the last few days on Roatan Island: torpid and languane (misspelled). Even if you have an extended high humidity heat wave in some location like Chicago or Boston, those two words just don’t feel like they would ever apply.
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Back to the west again today and tomorrow. If my progress around the world is eventually going to be measured by traveling from the east to the west, as it must, if I am going to make a circumnavigation – I’m really not going to make much progress for another couple months.

My good friend, Tim, emailed me a few days back and had me look at the SPOT map to see how little progress east I had made so far. It made me laugh a little. More of a down-the-world trip that a round-the-world trip so far.

I can hear John Madden describing my trip so far, in the reverse imagery that he would use talking about a running back: “He’s just running north and south!! He needs to turn it up east and west – BAM – hit the hole and just start running downhill. He’s never going to outrun the defense if he just keeps running along the line of scrimmage.”
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Waiting in the bus station for my bus from La Ceiba to San Pedro, about 3 hours down the road, where I am going to crash for the night, before the long day tomorrow traveling all the way from the Caribbean cost of Honduras to Nicaragua. In walks a huge, huge woman – 250+ pounds, easy. I silently mutter to myself: “please don’t let her be in the seat next to me on the bus.”

As I waited around, I started talking to an older couple from Pennsylvania that I had shared a cab ride from the ferry station to the bus station. He was American and she was originally from the Netherlands. As I listened to them talk to each other outside and then in the small bus station, it became clear that she was an unmitigated control freak. Told him what to do constantly. I’m not sure too many of you watch the Amazing Race, but she reminded me of the woman that made it to the final three with her husband – they were separated, but using the trip as some sort of exploration of whether they should get back together. My first and lasting though for that guy as I watched that show was, “run away. Run away quickly.” For this couple in the bus station, I imagined to myself that he thought it would be exotic and interesting to be married to a foreign woman, but has now realized that his life is a virtual living hell because of her.

One hour of listening to them was enough for me to draw this sweeping conclusion. Perhaps, just perhaps, I can have a tendency to leap a little quickly to conclusions. And right after I thought that, she upbraided him for knocking her book to the ground while she went to the bathroom and losing her placemark.

I also met a cool guy from Colorado that was just down to do some diving in the area. He gave me some tips on what to see in Peru when I got down there, as he had spent a month there not too long ago. All three things he mentioned were things I had read about and already wanted to do, but his descriptions added to me desire to hit them all.

And then I got on the bus. Seat 18. I knew who was going to be in seat 17 before I even got on the bus. And of course she was.