Adam E Mehaffey
May 7, 2015 | 1st pages, Travel
I had thought about leaving Australia for a while—well, maybe a couple of months. I had always thought for some reason that the grass would be greener on the other side, on what seemed like would be an open page compared to the routine of Australia and its isolation.
My best friend from childhood (my dog) had died a few months before, and I felt like I had nothing there for me anymore. So one day I awoke and had two words burning in the back of my mind—the same two words that I had gotten tattooed on my arm one year earlier on my seventeenth birthday: Carpe Diem, which is Latin for “seize the day / live life in the moment / take life by the balls.”
I rang all the travel companies in Australia, bartered for an extra few dollars off here and there, and booked a ticket to London. Just a few weeks later, I was on my way. During my flight, a sense of falling and impending doom swept across me as I awoke to my heart thumping in my chest.
A sense of panic quickly consumed me—both my mind and heart beating seemingly uncontrollably, playing their own rhythm independent of my thoughts, out of tune with me but still fulfilling their essential roles. I had a cloud over my consciousness, causing a sense of confusion.
Where was I? What was I doing? What situation was I in? I hadn’t been out of my comfort zone for a long time, so why did everything seem so foreign to me? As my collective thoughts started to come together, I suppressed the confusion that my anxious condition had brought upon me, and everything began to sink back into my half-conscious mind.
I was a wide-eyed, lonely, and somewhat innocent eighteen-year-old who had come to the conclusion that this was the best thing for me since my life hadn’t seemed to be going anywhere—well, except the path of a person who sets out to achieve nothing but yet blames every shit circumstance on anything and everyone but himself and then wonders why everyone else seems to have it so easy.
Ron Flanagan
Mar 19, 2015 | 1st pages, Travel
Before we begin I want to reiterate what the title of the book suggest, and that is this is a beginner’s guide to award travel. This is a basic, how to ebook on how to earn and use frequent flyer and hotel points. The purpose of this book is to teach you how to get started with award travel.
This book is not intended for someone who is already practicing award travel.
My goal is to give you a handbook on how to get started, and to share some of my experiences. This book is short by design. You won't find a bunch of fluff or repetition for the sake of achieving a specific book length. I am not an author, so please excuse any grammar errors, and understand that I have written this to help and not necessarily to win any literary awards. If you have purchased this book and realized it’s too basic for you, please feel free to use my 100% refund guarantee.
Often, when I explain my vacation trips, someone will ask, “How do you get to go on all these trips for free?” When I begin to explain the process I usually get shut down with, “It’s too complicated,” “I don’t have time,” or, “I don’t know how to even get started.” Anyone can practice this hobby, and I have written this book exactly for those who believe it’s too difficult.
My wife and I started this award travel hobby approximately three years ago. In that time, we have taken the following trips for free (or close to it): four trips to Disney World, two trips to New York City, an epic trip to two Hawaiian islands, and many weekend trips to places like Chicago, New Orleans, Nashville, and San Antonio. Currently, we are preparing for an eight-day trip to an all-inclusive resort in Costa Rica, for free.
Even after all of those trips, we still have a combined total of more than one million miles/points! And we've only scratched the surface of what’s possible in the world of award travel.
Jean Gill
Jan 16, 2015 | 1st pages, Travel
1.
Falling in Love
Every Sunday we feed the toilet or, to be more exact, we make an offering via the toilet to the Good Bacteria which, we hope, inhabit our septic tank. The weekly offering looks remarkably like ready-mix concrete, comes in an unlabelled sachet from a firm unwilling to divulge the ingredients of the magic potion but confident that it will prevent the ‘boue’ or ‘mud’ from building up in your ‘fosse septique’.
Just to be on the safe side, I treat the toilet, and tank, to an occasional yoghurt, which I was advised must be ‘live’. Have you ever scoured the supermarket shelves for live yoghurt, presumably as opposed to the dead variety? Isn’t all yoghurt live? I settled on natural and cheap, deciding that the toilet did not deserve an offering of cherry, strawberry or even lemon.
Thanks to the advice of the Welsh farming community I have left behind, I still have a few tricks up my sleeve in case we face the situation of one of those graphic French television advertisements; the scene is a jolly family birthday party outside under the trees, with a ten-year old blowing out the candles on his cake when – horror of horrors – each family member is overcome by the smell of their sadly neglected septic tank and the ten year old vomits on his birthday cake.
Needless to say, it is an ad for magic potion and although we fell about laughing when we first watched it, when we became the proud owners of a septic tank and accompanying house, we quickly stocked up on gray substance.
We didn’t wait until we moved to France to find out more about the little practicalities of life from our friends and neighbours. Our ex-home of Carmarthenshire, in the heart of South Wales, is a good place to seek advice on pretty well everything, but septic tanks arouse as much passion as anything else I’ve asked over the twenty-five years I adopted Wales as home, not worrying too much about whether it had adopted me.
It is essential to have the tank professionally emptied, a process involving a tanker and a presumably nose-dead human, with the reverse set of talents to those which enable the grand noses of France to create new blends of wines and perfumes.
Braz Menezes
Jan 7, 2015 | 1st pages, Romance, Travel
PROLOGUE
This Night Will be Different
“Please, Lando, I must see this with you.” Saboti in England had asked me to wake her up as the US election results start to come in at about 8:00 p.m. Eastern Standard Time. From my condo perched three hundred feet up in a concrete tower, I gaze down at Lake Ontario, and the thin dark shadow — like a Chinese brush stroke painting — against a mottled red-orange and mauve sky to the southwest.
It is the distant New York State shoreline. What happens behind that black line tonight may forever transform the way people view skin colour. Today is November 4, 2008. This is the night the world will change. Of this I have no doubt. He is intelligent and well educated. A calm composed candidate with a beautiful family. For me he stands tall, intelligent and confident – way above the competition.
Surely everyone must realise that Barack Obama is a natural born leader. He is bound to be successful. For the millions around the world who have experienced racism at first hand, it will mark a symbolic end to But just like lake flies in a Canadian summer, swarms of gloom and doom experts are buzzing around the media. Talking heads and their invited pundits have clogged the airwaves almost to gridlock. Radio and TV stations fill in the time between mindless commercial breaks with meaningless disjointed sound bites and admonitions on the risks of the unknown.
There are predictions and innuendos of Obama being no more than a black common-garden snake-oil Obama — like my friend Saboti — is of mixed race: the result of a liaison between a white parent and a black Kenyan partner. But America is not yet a colour-blind society. The pundits say many whites will vote with their eyes and not with their brain.
Each ethnic minority in this alleged melting pot will be looking out for its own narrow interests. They will, in doing so, split the vote. It can go either There is high tension and excitement on planet earth. Random polls in countries around the globe report that if their citizens could vote for an American President, Barack Obama would be their man. Eight years of the disastrous George W. Bush administration in the White House has left the world desperate, depressed and desolate. The economy of the USA and that of countries around the world is on the brink of the greatest financial crisis in a century, even as America fights two wars in Iraq and Afghanistan without an exit plan.
The minutes pass slowly as darkness sets in. I anxiously pace from room to room, trying to control my excitement or else my blood pressure will shoot through my head like a burst water pipe in the street. I glance outside into a blackness pierced by dots of lights, as the inhabitants of nearby buildings return from work to crouch with take-away dinners around their TV sets. It seems time has stopped.
It is nearly 7:00 p.m. as I press the mute button on the TV and turn to a music channel. They are playing my favourite, ‘As Time Goes By’ from the hit movie Casablanca –‘The world will always welcome lovers, as time goes by’. How very appropriate, I think! But no…on second thoughts, not so in my experience!
It is just over an hour before the polls close. Already it is a new day in London, five hours ahead of Toronto and the part of the USA I can see from my window. I press the mute button again. The pundits are still waffling. Unable to control my restlessness, I stop by the fridge and drop a few ice cubes into my special sixty-year old crystal glass, which I now use only on special occasions. I absent-mindedly place it on the table. I turn on the TVs in each bedroom — both tuned to different channels in case I have to second-guess the results projected by CNN.
God help me if I have to explain to Saboti the electoral system in the USA that I know many American voters themselves don’t fully understand, even as they choose a candidate who promises to fulfil their dreams.
Braz Menezes
Dec 11, 2014 | 1st pages, Historical, Travel
- My Day of Atonement
Lando,” Mom calls out from the kitchen window, “Have you and Simba been creating the usual matata for Mrs. Gelani? “Of course not, Mom,” I reply. “Dogs will be dogs. Simba simply loves Mr. Gelani’s pyjamas.”
“It’s not funny anymore,” Mom says. “You promised you would train him, so try harder.” I apologize. Seeking absolution has become second nature since I live in a constant state of guilt. On my first Holy Communion at St. Francis Xavier’s Church in Nairobi at age six, my older sister Linda had convinced me that World War Two started because I was born in 1939.
Simba, a three-year-old Rhodesian ridgeback named for the tan colour of his fur, cocks his ears and trots to my side to express solidarity. Simba means “lion” in Swahili. I put my arm around his strong neck as he nuzzles me. He loves his daily runs when he chases after cats, dogs, birds—anything that moves. This afternoon, Mr. Gelani’s saffron and avocado-striped pyjamas on the clothesline proved irresistible, billowing in the breeze like twin windsocks. Simba leapt up to grab them, just as Mrs. Gelani glanced out her window and erupted into a frenzied, screaming, gesticulating fireball.
Simba pushes his big body closer to me. He always responds with blind affection, especially when he hears “matata.” He seems to understand that I am in trouble again because of him. I hook his collar to a chain that slides along a galvanized wire in the garden.
“I’d better sort out this problem, Simba.” I give his neck a final rub and walk into the house.
Mom is chopping vegetables. She ignores my arrival, and reaches out to stir a pot simmering on the wood-fired cast iron stove in its soot-covered alcove. I play with the kitchen door, swinging it to-and-fro, slowly, very slowly, to wring every possible creak from its rusty hinges. Then I rattle the latch to create a knocking sound.
“What is it, Lando?” Mom asks. “You’re ten years old now and you should know better!”
“Mom, it was an accident last Sunday.”
“ Even if it was, now you have to face the consequences. Just go to Confession as Daddy has asked you to, and learn from this experience.”
I see tears in my mother’s eyes. “Do you feel sorry for me?”
“No. I’m not crying for you,” she says. “If you help me chop some more onions, you’ll see they’ll bring tears to your eyes, too. Now, please stop that noise and go outside and play. When will you give Simba his bath?”
I stomp out of the kitchen and slam the door.
In the bright sunshine, I feel empathy towards Simba, who is yelping. I too have been on a tight leash this past week. I have been placed under a curfew. I am not allowed out with my friends until after confession on Saturday, a week away.
Simba and I drift aimlessly around the yard. An olive-green lizard with dark lengthwise stripes pops up on a wall of our neighbour’s garage. Instinctively, I grab a rock and throw it. It misses. The lizard darts into nearby shrubs; the rock joins a pyramid below, a silent monument to the many lizards that have tempted fate. Simba leaps into the pile of stones, barking furiously.
“Your aim’s getting worse,” shouts Jeep, my best friend, who lives on the next street.
I cheer up. “Hey, Jeep, I have to go to confession. Will you come with me?”
“More matata?”
“Yes. Big ma-ta-ta.”
“Lando, I’ve nothing to confess. Not one little sin.”
“Please make one up, then you don’t have to do it later,” I beg. “I just don’t want to go alone. Please?”
After more pleading, Jeep agrees.
It is a warm Saturday afternoon as Jeep and I set off for Confession dressed in short-sleeved cotton shirts, khaki shorts, and our rubber-soled canvas shoes; our leather shoes are reserved for Sunday Mass and weddings. The jacaranda and bougainvillea are in full bloom.
If we walk along Kikuyu and Forest, roads that mark the legal boundary between the European and Asian neighbourhoods, it will take us 35 minutes from my home in Plums Lane to the church. Instead, we take a shortcut. We turn off into Sports Avenue at the European Railway quarters, though it entails some risk of an attack by guard dogs. It will save us about 15 minutes. We stop briefly by the elaborate brick and wood gateway to the Parklands Sports Club (1906) to gawk. Between the decorative palms we can see workers repainting the white Mangalore-tiled clubhouse, with its painted green band under the roof.
“Look,” I say to Jeep. “They’ve added a new sign. I wonder why they need a new one?” Below the old sign that reads “Europeans Only,” a new sign reads: “Members Only.”
“Dad has a Goan friend who works as an accounts clerk at the Muthaiga Club,” Jeep tells me. “He told Dad it’s very posh, and that Jews or even lower-class Englishmen can’t be members.”
“You mean they may have a caste system like Indians?” I say. “I’ll ask Dad about that.” The lane is fragrant from over-ripe yellow berries in the thorny kai apple hedges, but I smell something foul and instinctively hold my nose: “It is the smell of shit.” The ‘honey-wagon’, into which buckets from each house are emptied at night, must have been overflowing. The lane is also used for garbage pickup, which makes it worse.
“I am scared of these dogs,” I say, as a cacophony of barking erupts around us.
“Me, too,” Jeep replies. “Just be ready to scoot.”
JUST MATATA – Sin, Saints and Settlers on Amazon US
or JUST MATATA – Sin, Saints and Settlers on Amazon UK
Al & Sunny Lockwood
Dec 11, 2014 | 1st pages, Memoir, Travel
Cruising is among the most affordable and comfortable ways to travel. The Panama Canal (one of the greatest engineering feats of the twentieth century) embodies the allure of history with the adventure of sailing through the Continental Divide. So, why not combine the two experiences and make lifelong memories to treasure and share?
This is our experience (the good, the not-so-great, and the unforgettable) during a 17-day cruise from San Francisco to Fort Lauderdale, Florida, by way of the Panama Canal.
Who we are
Between the two of us, Al and I’ve made 137 trips around the sun. That clearly pegs us as a “senior” couple. Whatever the current term for those who qualify for Medicare and Social Security (senior, elder or old), it applies to us even though we see ourselves as just slightly post-middle-age, still full of curiosity and enthusiasm.
We’ve both chalked up long and varied careers, Al as a retired engineer, former minister, film photographer and I as a newspaper reporter, and columnist.
How this cruise began
Actually, this cruise started with a car wreck.
An irresponsible female, driving an SUV while texting, upended our lives July 8, 2012. Occurring just outside of Napa, California, this accident led to our cruise through the Panama Canal.
We were sitting at a red light, waiting for it to turn green. A large silver van sat in the lane next to us. Then the texting driver slammed full speed (60 mph) into us both, totaling all three vehicles in an explosion of metal and glass.
The rest of our summer filled up with doctor appointments, wrangling with insurance companies, complaining loudly and often about irresponsible drivers, and swearing that people who fool with their phones while driving should be jailed promptly, and have their driver’s license revoked.
The wreck also brought home to us how quickly the lovely life we share could end. How in a moment, one or both of us could be lying in a morgue or hooked up to monitors in a hospital.
As we talked about the wreck, we came to realize it’s time to do some of the things we’ve talked about doing “someday.”
We decided to make “someday” today.
Al has always dreamed of sailing through the Panama Canal – so we started researching Panama Canal cruises.
