In late June, my former University of Missouri-Columbia
research assistant, Chao-Min, visited Columbia with her son Kevin. Diane had fun cooking them a whole fish
served with the head attached. Most of our
American friends shuddered at the sight of the head, but it was no problem for
Chao-Min and Kevin who devoured the fish with glee. Chao-Min also visited all the other people we
had worked with in Gary Krause’s Ag. Experiment Station office, as well as Amy
Chow, owner of House of Chow, a Chinese restaurant we frequented.
Chao-Min, me and Kevin at our house
I was busy with work including Hoffman-LaRoche despite the fact it was being sold. One of the San Diego firms with whom I had a contract was also sold, and I didn’t hear from those clients again. My contract manager with Pfizer in St. Louis was pressuring me to limit my work with the scientists there. It was difficult to comply since many of them continued to request my help. Pfizer and several other companies, including two contract labs in Columbia, were still keeping me busy.
In August 2005, Diane and I drove to the East Coast. First, we visited our families (except for Diane’s sister Susan who now lived in Columbia). We saw many of Diane’s cousins: in Rumson, Dick, Glenn, Bonnie and her husband Richard and in West Orange, Peter with his wife Barbara and Joyce with her husband Divit. We visited my sister’s son Craig and his wife Mary Ann in Jersey City so that we could see their first born, Andrew. He arrived on Diane’s birthday Dec. 8 in 2004. In Princeton, we saw my sister, Earlene and husband Vince. In Pennsylvania, we saw Susan’s son Joe and his wife Angie’s first house. That is a lot of family!
Craig, Andrew and me
Several months earlier, Sara Steele had requested
that a painting of hers that we owned be shown in an exhibit at The Philip and
Muriel Berman Museum of Art. She paid
for the shipping. The museum is located
on the campus of Ursinus College in Collegeville, PA, a suburb of Philadelphia.
The exhibit had the same name as a book
that was being published about her paintings, Blueprints for Paradise. While we were nearby in New Jersey, we drove
over to see our favorite painting “Eggplants, Peppers, and Honey Tangerines” in
the exhibit. At home, we displayed it in
our dining room. Later that day we went
to Philadelphia and took The Constitutional Walking Tour where we saw the
Liberty Bell and Independence Hall (where the Declaration of Independence and
Constitution were signed) among other historic sites.
Sara Steele exhibit
In addition to travel and my work, I also
had the mundane but necessary task of managing our finances and health care. I turned 65 in October 2005, the age that
qualified me for Medicare medical insurance. I started Medicare Part A which is
required, but not the optional Part B that covered medically necessary services
and preventive services. Those were
insured by my business medical plan that I decided to keep for five more years
until Diane reached 65. There were no Part
D drug plans yet. I also found a
supplemental plan for myself to cover the deductibles and co-pays connected
with Medicare.
In
the fall, we drove to Colorado, and our Denver friends, Joe and Karen, took us
on a brisk walk in the mountain foothill meadows with yellow-leaved aspens,
streams, and wooden bridges. Back in the
city, we went on the Park Hill Home Tour where Diane and I saw a light fixture
we really wanted for our dining room.
Back at home, we were lucky enough to find a picture of the fixture in a
catalog, and soon it adorned our home.
In November before Thanksgiving, we flew to
Miami to spend a weekend with my K-State friend, Paulette, before Diane and I
started our 10th Olivia trip together. Paulette took us to the Fairchild Gardens for
its, and our, first, Chihuly Exhibit of
blown glass sculptures by renowned artist Dale Chihuly. The sculptures were presented in various
settings throughout the garden. At an
arts/craft show being held that weekend, Diane and I found a mobile in the
shape of a dragon that we couldn’t resist buying. We asked them to ship it to Columbia where we
hung it from the high hallway ceiling in front of our bedroom door. After all, Dragons can be very protective of
their patrons.
Chihuly at the Fairchild Gardens
Dragon mobile
The main Olivia trip was a cruise around
the Galapagos Islands, but we added the pre-trip to Machu Picchu. Our flight from Miami to Lima was uneventful,
and quickly we arrived at our hotel. To
relax and get in the mood, we put on our swimsuits and headed for the swimming
pool on the top floor. There we met
other Olivia women, swam to get the kinks out and enjoyed the views of the
city. The next day our group had a tour
of the nearby Pachacamac archeological site where
we were free to walk around and explore.
In the afternoon, we visited the Larco Museum which has an impressive
collection of pre-Columbian artifacts that help in understanding the societies
of that time period, as well as a special erotic gallery.
Our flight the next day took us from Lima
at sea level to Cusco at over 11,000 feet.
Our hotel room air conditioning was supplemented with extra oxygen. Even then, two of our women needed to spend
some time in a hyperbaric oxygen chamber.
We spent a couple of days in Cusco to help us acclimate. The group visited another archeological site
and farms that had both alpacas and llamas.
Alpaca wool is much softer than llama wool. There were demonstrations of making, dying,
and weaving the wool. Diane and I
purchased a large rug (5'1" by 3'11") made of an alpaca-sheep blend
in a design that reminded me of a mobius strip, a pattern of interest to anyone
with a mathematical background.
For the three nights and two days we would
spend in Machu Picchu, our tour leader instructed us to leave our big suitcases
behind and only bring clothes that would fit in the provided Hiram Bingham bags. We boarded the special train at the Poroy station
near Cusco, traveled through the Sacred Valley of the Incas and ended in Aguas
Calientes, at the foot of Machu Picchu. We
could walk from the train to our luxurious lodging which had the largest shower
I had ever seen in a hotel. The bus ride
up to Machu Picchu on a narrow and curvy road was very scary, but well worth
the trip.
Olivia women watching the scenery out the train windows
In 1911, American historian and explorer
Hiram Bingham was taken to Machu Picchu by a native. Although he was not the
first to visit the ruins, he brought Machu Picchu to international attention
and soon organized an expedition to undertake major clearing and archeological
excavation. It is considered by many to be the most spectacular urban creation
of the Incan Empire and one of the most important heritage sites in the world.
It sits on top of a mountain, in the tropical forest. The site is made up of precincts, plazas,
temples, tombs, rooms for storing food, stone canals and steep stairways,
toilets and platforms. Their food was
grown on more than 700 terraces that helped promote agriculture, and served as
part of an extensive system of water distribution which limited water erosion
on steep slopes.
We were glad to have our new walking sticks
as aides in navigating the high steps.
It would come as no surprise to our friends that neither of us felt the
energy radiating into our hands placed on the Intihuatana ritual stone. Later, we had Thanksgiving dinner enhanced by
the cranberry sauce that our Olivia guide brought in her suitcase.
Me and Diane
To get to the main part of our trip, we
took the train back to Cusco and flew to Guayaquil, Ecuador where we spent the
night. In the morning we flew to the
Galapagos Islands and boarded the Lindblad’s ms Islander. It was a small ship (only 48 passengers) that
allowed visits to tighter coves without disturbing the wildlife. Before we left for this trip, I read Charles
Darwin’s book, Voyage of the Beagle, which described his visit to the
Galapagos in the 1830s as a naturalist on that ship’s voyage up the coast of
South America. His observations led to
his theories about natural selection and his book The Origin of the Species.
The ms Islander and Olivia women on zodiacs
Luckily, we were there during the breeding
season and saw many young birds and animals.
It was fascinating to watch the male frigate birds, sitting on the nest,
puffing out their bright red throat pouch.
Normally they do this to attract females, but they were doing it to warn
us away from their nests. A small list
of the other birds we saw includes many species of boobies but especially the
blue footed booby, albatross, finches, Galapagos penguin, flightless cormorant,
pelicans, herons, and flamingos. It was
disturbing to see a Galapagos hawk raid unprotected nests for the young.
Male frigate bird with head resting on inflated red throat pouch
We saw both marine and land Iguanas, giant
tortoises and sea turtles. The giant
tortoises can grow to be 4 feet long.
The tortoise Lonesome George was still alive when we visited the Charles
Darwin Research Station on Santa Cruz, but died in 2012 after living for about
100 years. He was the last of his
subspecies of tortoise. On May 13, 2005,
the volcano on Fernandina Island erupted and the cooling lava was still red
when we walked the rim in December 2005.
We had to wear bandanas over our mouths and noses to keep from inhaling
the volcanic dust.
The northernmost tip of the largest island,
Isabela, crosses the equator. Despite
this, the Humboldt Current causes the water to be very cold. For our swimming adventure, we put on thick
wetsuits for protection, not an easy task.
Once we were taken to land, our goal was to enter the water, swim around
a point and return. I sat on the beach
to put on the fins and then tried to walk into the water. With each step, I caught sand with the tip of
my fins and was soon on my keester. I
laughed so hard at myself that I couldn’t get up. Diane finally calmed me down, I took off the
fins, walked with them into the water a few feet where I was able to put them
back on. Wearing our goggles, Diane and
I swam together with the wildlife. The seals were no problem, but an amorous
sea lion thought Diane was pretty cute.
While walking on land, we had been told to
not get between a mother seal and her baby.
After an outing, we were walking back toward the ship. I paused at a point where a mother was on my
left and her baby was on my right. After
waiting a while, it didn’t seem like they were going to move. I started walking and, of course, it was just
then the baby started moving toward its mother.
Diane said she had never seen me move so fast, as I sprinted, hurdled
over the baby and kept going. Later we
heard about a woman from another ship who hadn’t moved fast enough. It was our ship’s doctor who had to stitch up
the bite from the mother seal.
Mother seal nursing her baby
It was difficult to say goodbye to the
Galapagos. At the airport, we purchased
a foot-long tortoise carved in wood by a native. After flying back to the mainland, instead of
flying home, Diane and I continued to the capital of Ecuador, Quito. We were amazed to find the entire city was
celebrating the Foundation of Quito Day.
Truck and busloads of singing residents were driving around, fireworks
were going off, and we just joined in shouting “Viva La Quito!”
Even though we don’t speak Spanish, it was
easy to get around, and the local currency was the US dollar. On our walk the next day we found a history museum
to tour. When we stopped at a tourist
office with a question, we encountered a young worker who wanted to practice
his English. He was very friendly and
asked for help with his assignment of finding a pun or riddle to present to his
English class. I volunteered a riddle:
“What is black and white and read all over?”
He loved it.
Celebrating Quito Day
Even though we had crossed the equator on
our Galapagos ship, we joined a day tour going north to Otavalo so we could
cross it on land. We purchased two more
woven tapestries, both llama and sheep blends, one large (5'3" by
3'11") and one small (2'3" by 1'9"), each incorporating native
symbolic patterns. As we waited for the
tour group to re-assemble, we shopped in the market square. There was a stall containing artwork which we
looked through and found a painting we really liked of a peasant woman. Her face revealed great dignity, furrowed by
years of difficult living. We had a
limited amount of currency with us, and when we made an offer lower than the marked
price, we were turned down. Disappointed
but not willing to give up, we walked around the market square again, returning
to the stall, taking off our shoes, shaking them out, pulling out all of our
pockets, finding a few more dollars and adding them to our bargain, pleading
with the stall managers. They finally
relented, seeing how much we liked the painting and how we were sincerely
offering all the money we had.
Me and Diane at the equator
Our group stopped at a hacienda for lunch
on our way back to Quito. We were
entertained by the sight of costumed actors filming a Spanish soap opera. Then it was goodbye to Ecuador, having
completed our second visit to South America.