Tag: travel

We didn’t have to travel very far this day.  Our destination was Durham, NC, where we would be staying with the editor/publisher of my latest book.  He was kind enough to invite us to stay when he heard we’d be passing through.  Plus, he has a young daughter a couple years older than Toren so…

With Debi completing her PhD and me getting tenure and landing a sabbatical, we decided June 2013 would be the ideal time to take a long vacation.  With our many interests and varied obligations, what we finally decided on was a very long road trip up the East Coast, across the Midwest to Utah, and…

This was our last day working at Plenitud.  We put in the standard morning work day, but there were a couple of differences.  First, the students prevailed on the staff at Plenitud, who are predominantly vegetarian, to kill some of the chickens and cook them for dinner that night.  One of the students grew up…

This was our second excursion.  Typically the volunteering trips only have one excursion per trip, but the staff at Plenitud insisted we take two.  For this one, we headed to Playa Sucia, which is Spanish for “dirty beach.”  But it really wasn’t that dirty (there was some trash just north of the beach, but the…

This was another work day.  I don’t recall the details of what we did, but here’s another picture from Plenitud: We typically found work to do in the learning center in the afternoon when it rained.  On this afternoon we shucked a massive container of peanuts.  While we worked I told the students stories about…

We worked in the morning again.  But one of the staff members had also heard about a Jazz Festival in Mayaguez, about an hour away from the farm, that afternoon.  Since we kept getting rained out anyway, and because it was a Sunday, we ended up going out to the Jazz Festival that afternoon/evening.  While…

This was another work day.  But, if my memory serves me correctly, we also had a special treat.  Because we were only working half days and getting rained out in the afternoons, the staff at Plenitud arranged for a dance demonstration.  Some local dancers who dance a Puerto Rican traditional dance style, Bomba, came to…

This day was like the previous one, following the standard schedule.  But we did have our first novel activity that the staff arranged because we were stuck in the Learning Center in the afternoons: Salsa lessons.  They knew a young woman who was quite good at Salsa who came out this night and gave us…

This was a pretty typical day on the farm.  We got up at 6:00.  I read at the gazebo while some students did yoga.  We ate breakfast, then went out to work on projects – the ones I mentioned in the previous post (e.g., road maintenance, planting, weeding, etc.).  We’d usually work from about 8:00…