Resolutions

In past years, I've made many resolutions and managed to keep some of them for a few days while most of them were not kept at all. In fact, the only resolution I've ever been able to keep was the one I made to never make another resolution. I will, however, try to do a better job of keeping you in the loop about my photography, what's happening at shows and on location during the upcoming year.

So, we are on the road again. This time, we're headed on a two week cruise down the west coast on Mexico, Costa Rica, through the Panama Canal, a visit to South America and then on to Florida. I'll try to make daily posts but due to lack of Internet access, I may have to make several entries all at once.

We spent the first two days of our vacation traveling by bus and plane to San Diego. Then, the sore throat and head ache that I'd been plagued with for the past few days blew into a pretty good head cold. So, here I am, in San Diego and feeling pretty lousy. So lousy, in fact, that I passed on a trip to my favorite attraction, Sea World. I'll spend the day drinking lots of fluids and resting so I can feel better in the morning. How's that for optimism?

The last week of our trip moves us to Vancouver Island, BC where we plan to spend several days photographing the beautiful scenery and hopefully some bald eagles that will pose for me. We'll keep you posted...

I Don't Sleep On Planes

Leaving Seattle, we flew between Mt. Rainier and Mt St Helens. It was the best visibility of the whole trip and I can finally appreciate how really high Rainier is. We were climbing through 15,000 feet when the co-pilot came over the intercom to draw our attention to the massive snow capped peak. We’ll save some time on our next trip to get up close and personal with more of this natural beauty. That trip, only in the talking stages, already sounds like another full agenda. Our itinerary for Friday was to travel from Seattle to Dallas to Los Angeles to Lihue. Yes, I know, that’s not a direct route. We were at the Los Angeles Airport about to embark upon the third and final leg of our trip to Lihue, Kauai when the lady at the counter made an announcement about being way oversold and they needed volunteers to give up their seats. We’ve done this in the past. It’s called a bump. The airlines takes your seats, puts you on the next flight to your destination and gives you some sort of compensation. Here’s what we got: They put us on the next flight to Honolulu which was leaving in five minutes, gave us an $800 travel credit good for a year, put us up in a hotel in Honolulu for the night, gave us a $20 dinner credit, a $10 breakfast credit and booked us on a plane to Lihue for early the next morning. So, here I sit, very early on Saturday morning in the Honolulu airport waiting for our flight to Lihue. We haven’t had more than a few hours sleep over the past 24, traveled thousands of miles crammed into a space smaller than a phone booth and we’ve been eating airport food . It’s hard to say which has bothered me more but I keep telling myself the perks were worth it. Carl has found a used newspaper to browse while I tap out the keys to keep everyone updated. When we finally arrive in Lihue, there are issues still facing us. Where is our luggage and will our rental car still be available? I have to say that it’s much easier to find a place that you only visit every other year during daylight hours.