Dadcation
We pushed through a port-o-john door covered in stickers, walked past the urinals, and entered the hidden bar behind Bodega Taqueria for what I’d thought would be a quiet speakeasy like the ones we’ve visited in Denver, San Francisco, Austin, Atlanta, Rome, Paris, Kyoto, Boston, New York, Chicago, and San Antonio. Instead, it was a giant, warehouse-like enclosure with a DJ and dancing. It was a time warp to 2019. “We need to get out of here before we get the Covid!” We closed our tab (the place…
There are lots of pretty islands in the Caribbean, so folks have been understandably puzzled by our going somewhere that requires as much planning as does traveling to Cuba, but ever since seeing his home in Key West last year and his grave in Idaho the year before, I’ve badly wanted to see where Hemingway spent most of his final 20 years. And so, on a Saturday morning at 8, we climbed into the back of an ’89 Peugeot and headed east 10 miles from Havana. Our first…
Friday morning after breakfast, I wanted an internet card to check email on my phone, so we started walking toward the Hotel Nacional when a local named Reynoldo told us we could get half-priced cigars just down the street, because it was a cigar holiday today! But only until noon. We kept walking toward the hotel, and just as we were about to enter, another local stopped us, said he recognized us from our B&B–because his mother lives next door–and he too said today’s the day for half-priced…
Get this. From Atlanta, you can fly 90 minutes and land in a parallel world. It has 2 currencies: the CUP for locals (featuring faces and colors); the CUC for tourists (featuring statues and shades of brown). Doctors, engineers, and teachers forgo their $60/month, $40/month, and $20/month salaries to buy 1989 Peugeots or even older Russian-built Ladas for $50k to be private taxi drivers, which you can tell from the “P” leading the string of characters on their license plates. Any new cars you see will start with…
Speeding away from Mountain Home AFB and all the structure a day spent with active duty military can bring along US-20 E through high desert and into the Rocky Mountains on a Monday afternoon during business hours felt like the most freedom I’d had in years. The highway wound through rocky hills flanked by “Game Crossing” and “Watch For Stock” warning signs along with nighttime speed limit admonitions; there were multiple pull-offs with signs telling passersby that this was part of the Oregon Trial or an old gold…