Travel Blog: Bohol, Philippines- Part One: I Flew To The Other Side Of The World To Go Diving & All You're Getting Is One Singular Mention Of The Ocean In This First Blog

BOHOL, PHILIPPINES

Prologue

Hello Fellow Travelers,

Welcome back to one of my absolute favorite blog series that I do here at my beloved site; travel blogs! I know, for a large handful of you all, this is also your favorite series of mine & I think for good reason. This is often the blog that I get to share major passion of mine, travel, as well as a few subsequent others such as food, beverage, dive, & storytelling. Fortunately for all of us, this series will contain all of these aspects & more! So, if you’re along for the ride, buckle in, as the full scope of this trip & its embedded tales will take up a good three weeks worth of space on this blog! With all of that being said & everything else out of the way, let’s dive on in shall we?!

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PART ONE:

Day One

Los Angeles, California

Evan & I landed in Los Angeles around 10 AM on March 7th. Our direct flight options for our arrival with Southwest Airlines were either the flight we chose or one that got in around 9:15 PM, which would have cut us far too close to our 10:35 PM departure with EVA Air for Taipei. This naturally left us with around 9 hours worth of time to burn before we had to check-in for the aforementioned flight. Initially our plan was to have our friend Jenna pick us up from LAX & drop us back later but upon looking into the amount of time it would force her into in commutes on our behalf we opted to rent a car for the day instead. Popping on over to Avis we snagged the rental I had booked the evening prior, a Tesla Model 3, of which Avis has an exclusive deal for the rental of. The really nice part about it was that we weren’t responsible for charging it upon its return which really helps save you a bit of cash, especially with LA gas prices being around $5 a gallon.

Downtown Los Angeles

Jenna had planned to head over to Pasadena to catch our other friend Rory’s Barry’s Ass & Abs class. She’d suggested dropping our luggage with her in North Hollywood, then carpooling around together, but unfortunately the time it would have taken for such a measure would have forced us to miss Rory’s class. So we opted just to meet there instead. We made it to Pas with about ten minutes to spare & loaded our luggage into the locked trunk & loathsomely named “frunk” (front trunk) of the Tesla.

I think Evan has cursed us, either that or it’s all to do with the timing of when we travel seeing as he is off Wednesdays & Thursdays so we usually end up flying those days. Either way we seem to always do a “leg day” the day prior to large amounts of travel, I guess this time would be no different.

Barry’s has a lower focus class on Tuesdays & an ass & abs class on Thursdays, that usually ends up being the cause of his post-leg day flight woes. Even if we don’t end up at Barry’s we typically end up adhering to their schedule so that we don’t get thrown into a wonky “I’m too sore for this” situation should we decide to hit another of their classes during the week.

Burlington Arcade In Pasadena

After class we were all desperately craving a coffee. Evan & I had wanted to venture into The Burlington Arcade in Pasadena for a while & the Pas Barry’s location just happened to be right within the same block or two, so that’s where our search began & ultimately ended.

The Mandarin Coffee Stand is nestled right in the middle of The Arcade. It is a teeny, tiny coffee shop that has a customer occupancy limit of four guests at a time. The are a local, Asian women owned & operated shop that specializes in Chinese style coffee. I got a latte known as the “Toasty” which consists of Rooibos, Cinnamon, Espresso, Brown Sugar, & Oat Milk. Not typically a fan of the milk of the oat, I tried it anyway at the recommendation of the barista & it was nothing short of bangin’! As we stood around the strip sipping our respective coffees we all decided the next necessary & logical step would be to find food.

If you were to dig into the notes app on either Evan or my phone you’d discover a shared note simply titled “Travel Visits.” In said note you will find lists upon lists of mostly restaurants & bars that we’ve written down over the years to try should we ever find ourselves in any of the locations listed therein. Despite our many years in LA the list for it seems to continue to grow & grow & so we both began to pilfer through in search of what would inevitably be that day’s lunch.

Many of the locations that we found were either evening only, too far from Pasadena, North Hollywood, or LAX, weren’t open that day, or weren’t a type of food we were all feeling, but at the end of our extensive filtering we ended up deciding on a deli in Westlake called Langer’s.

Langer’s Delicatessen-Restaurant was founded in 1947 & has been in the Langer family ever since. They are a member of the LA Times 101 Hall of Fame & have been a staple on the Michelin guide for many years. They are famous for their #19 Pastrami Sandwich which has been voted amongst the world’s best which is exactly what Evan & both ordered. The sandwich was excellent, sporting Pastrami on Rye with Coleslaw, Swiss Cheese & Russian Dressing. Jenna ordered a simple sliced Salami on a Hoagie it Provolone which was simple & delightful in its own way. After lunch we ended LA’s early afternoon traffic & made our way towards Jenna’s place in North Hollywood. Once we’d gotten to North Hollywood we pulled off into the CVS to grab a few provisions.

Laurel Canyon, Los Angeles

Photo Credit: Evan Michael

Anytime I fly overseas or on a flight that is longer than 4-5 hours I bring the cabin crew a sack of goodies just to say “thank you” & help ease their time on the job in even the slightest of ways. I typically pick up some family sized packs of chocolates, candies, & snacky things to give out. In addition to our care package we also picked up some Zzzquil for the flight, since it was an over nighter. After acquiring our items we continued onto Jenna’s to recharge for a bit; both for ourselves & our devices which had already made it through a morning of travel & a day of light exploration.

With our time in LA coming to an end & our need to head off to the airport approaching, we popped into a quick shower, refreshed deodorants & the like, & swapped over into our travel clothes before packing everything back up, bidding Jenna a fond farewell, & beginning the hour+ commute to the airport.

Once we’d dropped the car back at Avis we headed into LAX to check-in for our EVA Air flight to Taipei with continued service to Manilla. Once we got to Manilla we’d have to go through immigration & customs before rechecking our bags & continuing on. We met the rest of our group from Midwest Aquatics that were headed to Bohol at the check-in gate & after greetings & hugs we all headed through security.

The process was lighter than usual so we found ourselves incredibly early for our flight, so much so that the British Airways flight occupying our gate hadn’t even received their plane. We wandered around the international terminal before settling in on something to eat. After some truly mid fish tacos, I found a secluded corner in which to write two weeks ago’s blog & awaited the boarding process.

We boarded right on time & once we’d taken off, & eaten our in-flight meal, we took the Zzzquils & attempted to get some sleep.

Downtown Los Angeles

End Of Day One

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Day Two

Taipei, Taiwan

We arrived in Taipei around 5:15 AM, local time. I managed to sleep for about a half or so of the duration of the fourteen & a half hour flight, Evan managed about two thirds. That was when he wasn’t attempting to shut off our sleeping neighbor’s over head light.

We had booked ahead online & gotten ourselves the exit row. I’m a rather tall gent at 6’4” & definitely need the extra leg room that the exit row or premium economy provide, especially on airlines based out of parts of the world where people tend to be on the shorter side. I had the “window” (there was no window) & Evan had the middle. At the time of our booking the aisle seat was already occupied, we actually assumed that it was Deb, a member of our group. It wasn’t, it was a gentlemen we had no relation to. When you’re in the exit row all of the buttons for your seat are located on the arm rest to your left about thigh high. Strangely enough, in EVA Air Economy Class, the reading light for the aisle seat illuminates the middle seat. No joke. Like each of the other buttons illuminate each of their respective seats, except for the aisle which basically doubles up on the middle. Additionally, the man on the end’s button for his over head light seemed to be a little on the sensitive side & every time he shifted in his seat it lit up the light over Evan’s head. I legitimately thought it was his own light until I noticed him slyly reaching over, across the man’s lap, trying to tap his light button. In his words “I had no issue with the light itself, it was the heat that it generated that was keeping me awake.” When he finally got around to turning off the light the man shifted in his seat thirty seconds later, immediately reigniting Evan’s personal warming bulb. Later when he got up to use the restroom, Evan positioned the man’s blanked so as to block any accidental bumping of the button from occurring.

Wheel Pies

We had about a three-ish hour layover in Taipei & we’d arrived before any of the shops & restaurants had opened. So, we as a group, decided to stretch out collective legs & walk the length of the terminal. By the time we’d made it all the way down shops had begun to open. Several members of our group took special interest in the Sanrio shop but I had my eyes set on a bakery that was beginning their prep as we initially walked by. The bakery in question is called Mazu Village, it’s half wheel pies & half boba stand. The boba & wheels pies are presented in a combo format so Evan & I opted for the one that would let us each have one of each of the two flavors; Salted Custard & Salted Custard with Peanut Butter, & also gave us each a Taro Boba Tea. The rest of the group ended up with something similar & while the two of us had decided that we favored just the custard pie over the one with peanut butter, as we found it too rich, the others disagreed.

Taiwanese Beef Noodle Soup

After our saccharine breakfast we sat around making calls for a bit. Evan called his family & I called my sister, whose birthday it still was in the states. At this point we’d crossed the international date line & were a half a day ahead of everyone back home. We waited around a bit longer before I went to a booth to buy some Taiwanese Beef Noodle Soup which Evan & I split. I actually think one of the best parts of the soup was the Sauced Cabbage that came with it & the hyper sweet Cold Assam Tea. We wandered around the airport for a bit after we finished our food, flitting in & out of the assorted duty free shops before we descended to our gate to wait to board.

In the Taoyuan International Airport all of the gates are situated a level below the main parts of the concourse so you have to ascend a flight of stairs/take an elevator up when you arrive & descend the stairs/elevator when you plan to depart. It’s nice because it keeps the waiting areas separate from the hustle & bustle of the main terminal. The EVA Air Gods saw fit to grace us with the Sanrio plane for our trip from Taipei to Manila. I was actually surprised to see how many of us in the group were excited about that, but the plane was cute! Even once we’d boarded the plane was full of little Sanrio easter eggs such as the Hello Kitty air freshener holder in the lavatories.

Sanrio EVA Airplane

We departed Taipei at around 9:10 AM local time & began our two hours & thirty minute flight across the Luzon Strait to the Philippines & Manila.

Manila

Our flight landed in Manila at 11:45 & we were immediately ushered off the plane to immigration. Evan somehow made it through the passport check without filling out the online application for a visa, the rest of us weren’t so lucky. We were all handed a QR code to scan & fill out a digital form before we could get our stamp. Pretty standard procedure, just thought it was odd Evan got through without it, he must just have one of those faces.

He did fill out his visa application retroactively as we sat waiting for our baggage to come through. Figured it was better to have it done & entered in, especially if it ended up being needed upon our departure. Once we all had our luggage collected we headed out to the transfer area where we booked the transfer shuttle to the local departures terminal & exchange USD for Filipino Peso.

The man running the shuttle kiosk at the international terminal told us that it would be about a forty-five minute wait before we would have a transfer & it wasn’t guaranteed that we would all fit, in which case they would have us wait an additional 30-45 minutes for the next shuttle. I’m not really sure how or why the transfer times on the shuttles are so long, especially since the walk time between the two terminals was only about 5-10 minutes. We all opted for that.

The walk was a bit of a system shock. Most of us changed into lighter clothing before hand, but coming from LA & then Taipei where the weather was sitting in the mid to upper 50s, the shift into the 80s felt like much more drastic a change. By the end of our walk to the other terminal we were all sweating. Each of us reapplied deodorant & proceeded to the Philippine Airlines ticketing counter where we were met with one of the more common annoyances when it comes to checking baggage internationally across different carriers; entirely different baggage rules. We made it work & got everything figured out without the need for any extra dollars being exchanged.

By the time we made it through security we only had about an hour to an hour & a half left over in what was our four hour layover. We camped the bags & we went out exploring in waves to see what the airport terminal had to offer. Two party members came back with some rather tantalizing looking Boba Tea & Evan & me, & two others set out to find & claim our own.

Once the teas were acquired we returned to our gate & waited to board. Around 3 PM we all started lining up to board & before long we were off on our way to the island of Bohol.

Bohol

Bohol-Panglao International Airport is a bit on the smaller size, boasting around five or six gates in total. We arrived after our brief hour & a half flight just before 5 PM where we descended the escalator to the single baggage carousel, collected our belongings, & were greeted by the Magic Oceans transfer crew with water bottled & some bomb ass banana chips. We all climbed into the two vans they’d provided, with out luggage occupying a third vehicle, & off we went towards Anda.

Bohol, Philippines

The drive to the dive resort was a long one, not going to lie. We’re talking like two & a half to three hours long. After being in planes for a total of 22 hours off & on & laying over, I think all of us were ready to be done & there. The benefit of these far out locations & trips is that once you’re there, you’re there for a while! They also certainly drive different in the Philippines than we do here in the states. For starters there’s no speed limits, at least not in Bohol, unless designated by a work or school zone. They also don’t necessarily abide by the lanes. Evan & I got sat on the front bench of the van & I think we both regretted it as there were many times that each of us was slamming down our foot on the imaginary brake that we each wish we had. At the end of the day though the driver DID deliver us safely to Magic Oceans, even though I though we were going to hit dogs or those going out on the then Saturday evening who were walking along the side of the road.

I did manage to sleep the last hour & some change in the car, mostly because I had to pee & it seemed the only solution to avoiding that issue. We arrived in the darkness to Magic Ocean where we were all guided to the dining area for dinner, which was in full swing. Dinner at Magic Oceans is served family style with an exquisite chef preparing an appetizer course, a main course with around five dishes, & a dessert. I made it about halfway through the trip before I realized that I’d forgotten to write down the nightly menus so unfortunately they will be absent from this series despite their amazing quality in nature & the chef who prepared them’s lovely singing voice (we’ll get to that in later installments).

Once we were all situated with food, Evelyn, the resort manager gave us a quick briefing regarding our rooms & the plan for the morning in which we planned to start our diving. Once she had finished we were each escorted privately to our rooms where our luggage awaited us & promptly showered & went to bed so as to be ready & refreshed for the adventures that awaited us the following day!…but not before I went out the door of our room to the sandy overlook where I sat listening to the rush of the ocean for a few minutes.

…see, I mentioned it, once…& yes, that did happen, seriously. There were Dwarf Zebra Hermit Crabs in the sand fighting over a scrap of food. Evan even took a picture of me headed there! (See Below)

Path Outside Our Room At Magic Oceans

Photo Credit: Evan Michael

End Of Day Two

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END OF PART ONE

Why I Love...: The Pacific Northwest

Hello,

Happy New Year! I hope that your holidays were relaxing, rejuvenating, healthy, stress free, & uncomplicated. I also hope that you didn’t miss me on the two week hiatus that I took during the latter half of December; I was traveling, seeing family, & even played a show or two. I appreciate you all allowing me the space to do so & having the patience & understanding for those times when I need to dip away for a minute. I always worry subconsciously that no one is going to come back any time I skip a week or so with the blogs, but amazingly so many of you return with your love & your hunger for the stories that I tell, the feelings that I share, the experiences I so exuberantly pass along to you all, & time that it takes to interject my life into yours for however long you choose to read these pages.

I was struggling to find a topic for today’s blog at first, until Evan shared with me a TikTok highlighting a minute of different vignettes around the PNW. Then, as the deep pang of homesickness hit me, so too did the idea for this blog. However, with the singular idea also came a myriad & the idea further blossomed from one stand alone piece to the series I hope that this will become.

I am privileged to call myself well travelled. I have been to many corners of the world & fallen in love with many of the locations & people I have come to know along the way. As someone who travels, & travels often, I often feel a deep sense of “Saudade” (see attached blog) but I also get frequently asked about my favorite places & the question that always seems to follow the locations I disclose is “Why Do You Love It?” So, therein lies the blog idea. My friend Josh Brady, an excellent writer & author himself, reached out to me regarding the PNW post & said “Now you’re making me miss it too. Only lived in Washington for two years, but I miss it every day. Been dying to get back ever since I moved away.” To which I replied “There’s something about the way that the mist & the darkness creeps into your bones & embeds itself there that is inescapable." Which immediately flooded my mind with all of the other things about the region that I hold so dearly intertwined in my DNA. Welcome, dear reader, to the “Why I Love…” series. May it help you find connection around the world & fill your spirit with a sense of wanderlust, comfort, & adventure.

Why I Love…

The Pacific Northwest

There’s a spirit to the PNW that is unlike any other, it maintains the wild, untamed energy that most of the land west of the Rocky Mountains carry, but there’s something deep & brooding about it, like slowly drifting into a bottomless slumber. The freedom that emanates from the “ungentrified, uncolonized, untainted” wilderness allows an unbridled sense of personal expression & peace that is probably, in part, reasonable for the coined slogan “Keep Portland Weird.” And while the free spirited, often aloof nature of its city dwelling people may not be everyone’s cup of tea, their sense of personal freedom & being is undeniably admirable. The PNW is undeniably a place where they have yet to kill their mother. Those who live on the land work, almost to a fault, to preserve the natural beauty & antiquity of their home resulting in a world that feels almost alien to those of us who have become so accustomed to the strip malls & park lotted developments of our modern, American, late-capitalist system.

The PNW is a palette of sullen vetiver, slithering grey, lush alpine, contemplative blues, & rich earthy browns. The unique & ravenous landscape sits nettled perfectly between the Cascade Mountains & the Pacific Ocean feeding & nurturing a rift of ultra-fertile volcanic soil that gives life to everything that plants roots in its ancient fields. Trees grow tall & slender, fed by the creeping mists & the drizzly, spitting rain & waterfalls & life flow freely throughout.

The coast of The PNW is a unmastered darkness that feels simultaneously like the cold embrace of welcomed solitude & the longing for something simpler & altogether uncomplicated. The ocean does little to hide its fury & ferocity here but also isn’t afraid to share the most vulnerable & quiet aspects of itself. The life that teems beneath its hushed waves is cold & hardy & embeds small bits of its soul into the driftwood & tumbled cobbles that wash up on its shore.

I have yet to meet anyone who has made their way up to The PNW & not fallen in love with it. There is simply something for everyone & I think that it connects with something intrinsically primal within us all & makes us feel strangely at home. Despite its urban developments & modern amenities there is something about it that just makes you want to reconnect with nature. It makes your soul yearn for darker days propped up in a cabin by the sea or in the mountains with an exquisitely crafted cup of coffee, some fresh fruit & berries, a fire in the hearth, & a warm bowl of chowder in hand. It is the coziness of a home but lives more so in the space of yearned for loneliness in the best possible way.

I love The Pacific Northwest because it is somewhere that the Earth still sings, it is somewhere that forces you to understand where you fit in the great circle, & that beckons you home away from the noise & the tech to just be in the pure surroundings of Mother Earth. The PNW feels like a fresh breath of the cleanest air, it is at the same time timeless & archaic. I love the PNW because it is the land that birthed me & it is also the land that draws me into the deepest embrace whenever I have the privilege of returning.

-C

Blog: Saudade

“Saudade is an emotional state of melancholy or profoundly nostalgic longing for a beloved yet absent something or someone.” From its original Portuguese it directly translates specifically to the word ‘longing’ though the type of longing it is indicative of is so much deeper.

I’ve seen this word floating around a lot over the last couple of weeks, mostly on different social media platforms where my algorithm has been skewed towards to traveler in me. A lot of those who are sharing it are doing so in respect to this field of interest; travel, & it’s really struck a chord with me as someone who has been feeling rather “saudade” for a while now.

To those of you who are not travelers, who don’t crave the almost ingrained need to go out into different parts of the world & forge connections with the people who live there, this concept may be very foreign to you. But to those of you who are like me, this feeling is all too familiar & it can be immutable & often impossible to satisfy. You see a lot of us crave the authentic human relationships we make in our travels but we often do so all at once. We want the ability to have these people we love to see, whom we see seldom, if barely at all, in the places that they live their lives, but we want the ability to do so simultaneously with every one we’ve made connections with. We want to be able to call up our friends in Scotland or Singapore or Seattle or Australia or LA or Hawaii or New York & get dinner with them, or hang out face to face, because they make us feel that sense of what it is to be human & have genuine, effortless connection. Needless to say this is, unfortunately, an impossibility.

They say the marker of a true friend is that you can grow separately, living your respective lives & having your own lived experiences, but when you come back together it feels like no time has passed even though you’ve grown & aged as a human being. For those who truly find bliss in our travels, not because of how it presents outwardly & idealistically, but because of how it gives us an understanding of the different parts out this, our human tribe, these scattered friendships around the globe leave us in a constant state of this longing. But unfortunately travel is expensive & often the plans we so desperately want to lay fall through because of lack of funding or time.

I had a moment of great privilege a few months ago. I came to the realization that we wouldn’t be hitting The UK this year & that made me really depressed. Not just because I love to venture out, but because, in a lot of ways, The UK, its people, its culture, its locations, have grown to be a bit of a second (or third, or fourth) home for me. Any time I hope the pond it doesn’t feel touristy or like a vacation, but instead feels like a homecoming. My sadness came out of a realization that I wasn’t going to get to see the people & the places that I love so dearly & not out of missing out on a “vacation.”

I think that truly those of us who are “travelers” will tell you that our “vacations” are seldom that, vacations. We spend our time abroad doing the leg work to meet people where they’re at & experience a glimpse of life through their eyes or their shoes. I often return home from trips feeling like I need a vacation, not because the trip was draining, it’s often quite the opposite, invigorating, I’ve just been on mentally, physically, & spiritually the whole time & need time to recenter & recalculate my bearings.

As per usual, I say all of this to inform. I feel like the vast majority of people travel to vacation & those of us who view it in more of an ambassadorial way are seldom spoken about or acknowledged. Just know that most days your traveler friends are experiencing a state of saudade & whether you empathize with it or not it is a near constant in most of our lives.

As always, much love,

C

Blog: Stumbling Through Life

This past week when I arrived back home from Arizona I received an email from a site called Feedspot. In the email they congratulated me on being placed as one of their 70 Best Nashville Music Blogs & Websites in 2023 to which they assigned me the 35th place. Now, I never applied for this site, nor had I honestly heard of it until I received the email, additionally I know absolutely zilch about the site or company itself but at the end of the day I’m honored that I was even considered to be on the list at all. After all, this blog is often just a journal of my ramblings & misadventures, a collection of my thoughts & feelings. The crazy thing is that, for whatever reason, it connects with people & that is what I am most grateful for.

So be honest, I’m not entirely sure what I’m doing each Friday or Saturday when I post a new entry in this crazy chronicle. What started out as a way to share my travel expertise & taste has shifted into a bit of an enigma that I’m still not entirely sure I have a grasp on. I’ve mentioned it before in previous blogs just how random & unexpected this is at times but in all honesty it often feels like I’m just stumbling through life, randomly landing on the occasional accomplishment.

I think this is true of most things I do; I put out music & it often sticks in the most random of places but seldom the ones that I intend. Same goes for this space. The blogs I write out of pain, frustration, or exhaustion are often the ones that are still read to this day. So too are the ones that I write from random spur of the moment travels, not the ones I spend weeks crafting trying to give my best possible recommendations for the many places in the world that I have frequented. To say I feel a tad unmoored or aimless in my day to day would be an understatement.

Maybe that’s all a part of the human experience, maybe I’m preaching to the choir here, but it feels like most days I wake up with a big, fat question mark floating above my head. I spend most of my mornings trying desperately to figure out the course of my day. Do I still have lists of tasks & work that I do each day? Of course, but it feels a little like I’m going through the motions a bit with no real end in sight. I don’t mean to say I’m depressed, quite the opposite, of the most part I find myself content, which is something that I believe we should all strive for, but I wish I had a better sense of direction or overt purpose than what I feel on my average day.

Again, maybe I’m preaching to the choir here, or maybe this is entirely taboo to you as a reader but there are so many days that I wish someone would just grab me by the shoulders, look me dead in the eyes, & say ‘this is what you’re meant to be doing & this is how you get there.’ I wish there was an overt light or guide holding my hand through the blackness & pulling me towards my destination instead of feeling like a mast-less ship adrift in the middle of the Pacific surviving of a steady supply of rainwater, fresh fish, & a library of assorted books, musical instruments, & games. Did that analogy land or did it sink?…I’ll leave.

At the end of the day I am grateful. I am grateful that I get to spend my life creating in different fashions. I am grateful that I get to see & experience the world & all of the incredible beauties it holds. I am grateful that I have the space & lack of pressure to do something that is soul sucking & I am grateful to each of you out there who read or listen to the inner machinations of my mind & find them interesting enough to keep coming back. I am just longing for clear direction as so many of us do but in the mean time I intend to stay in my contentment & learn as I try to grow towards whatever end awaits me.

As always, much love to you all,

-C

Story: Let's Go Back, Back To The Beginning

Earlier this week I grabbed coffee, or rather tea because I’m trying to cut my caffeine intake, with a new friend. At one point in the conversation he brought up my blogs. You know, this thing you’re currently feasting your eyes upon. The first thing he asked me was “how & why did you get started doing blogs” & it occurs to me now that I’ve never formally had that conversation with you all who return week after week, drift in & out, or have randomly stumbled upon this here post. It was an interesting thing to talk about & kind of piece together along the way as I told him the story but the idea of recounting it here hadn’t occurred to me until today when I sat down to write, at which time I was met with a random passing “how did you get started, how far have you come?” question while pilfering through the internet.

My blog page started as a recommendation blog. I had a former manager who commented on the fact that I always have food & drink recommendations for people when they go anywhere & that I should compile a list so that people can access that information at any time without having to text or DM me. The first one, naturally, was Nashville. I compiled a list of restaurants on one blog post & bars on another & published it to actually fairly moderate success. In fact the blog still remains actively edited to this day when I remember to make edits & feel like adding in new restaurants/bars or when some of the ones on the list have closed. From there my recommendation blogs continued. I did an LA food one next, followed by LA drink, then came Kansas City, which I’m pretty sure is a combination blog, & Portland, which I know for a fact is.

Now around this time the mailing list craze was really kicking off & I went to a seminar about marketing for artists such as myself. Someone on one of the panels brought up that one artist they knew did a weekly blog where she detailed & documented her week & then sent it out as a newsletter before the weekend. This sparked the idea of these now weekly blogs.

I knew I didn’t think my day to day life was interesting or varied enough to entice readers to come back week after week so instead I opted for a different approach. My blogs would be varied. Sometimes they would be recommendation blogs, sometimes recipes since I cook quite often, sometimes they would actually be about an event I experienced if I found that event to be interesting enough for a retelling.

Around the time I started to write blogs happened to coincide with the events & civil rights travesties of the Trump Administration. As someone who found himself incredibly politically literate & in possession of a platform, I started writing blogs highlighting the damage that was being done to The USA at large. Additionally, within that same vein, I started to write think pieces directed towards those reading who I knew might fall on the conservative spectrum about more liberal policies & why they are beneficial. I tried to frame them from the perspective of someone who would be against them to mixed success. I continued on this track, using my blog to post my opinions as well as resources when natural or political disasters struck. It wasn’t until May of 2021 that I started doing travel blogs.

Evan & I ended up in Maui right around the time that the tourism industry reopened in Hawaii. I had gone to finish the open water side of my dive certification & had just invested in a GoPro to grab footage of our time there. I did it partially for content & also so the people I knew that cared to know about my adventures had a place to turn to & get the inside scoop of all the goings on of my travels. Additionally it allowed me to combine a lot of the elements of what I was doing; storytelling, recommendations, etc., into one single post in one single place. The thing I ended up underestimating was the time in which each of these travel blogs take.

So the travel blogs ate up a lot of time, most of them ended up being around a two to three week series that took me around the totality of the week to complete for each. I had to write the stories, link the places, go through edit & add the photos, place the photos aesthetically, etc. etc. etc. but I quickly found that these were my most popular submissions. That’s until I wrote a blog called “No Hate Like Christian Love.”

NHLCL was really a think piece for me, a plea for the evangelicals of the world to look at how they were asked to behave in the book they claim to cling to & compare that to the way they are actually perceived by the world & also understand why “the church” is dying. It remains my most popular blog to this day, out performing each of my weekly submissions during the week they’re posted. NHLCL still garners easily around one hundred individual views a week just from people either searching for something of the like or having stumbled upon it some other way. It has, aside from each of my travel blogs, been the biggest source of outreach & foot traffic to this, my website.

So where are we today? Well, this piece, I suppose, could be filed under “story.” The shape that my blog has taken over the years is very reflective of who I am as an individual, all encompassing. I think, if I were to choose a direction for it to go, it would mostly remain in the story telling world, specifically as a recounting of my travels & the highs & lows of my life. I like to think that my blog has a positive influence on the world, as small or large as that is, but I suppose that’s for you all to decide, not me. The hard part about getting travel content for you all is getting to travel, having the funds & time to scour the globe for my next adventure to bring back & share with you all. If that weren’t as much of an issue, I think this blog would definitely take that shape more often than not. I’m always down for feedback though! I’d love to know what you’ve liked & disliked about my blog over the years. I’d love to know what you’d like to see more of or less of. I’m always intrigued to know who is reading my posts, why, & what they got out of it.

As always,

Much love to you all & thank you for supporting this crazy weekly thing that I do!

-C

Blog: #Goals! Wait, Scratch That, #VisionBoards!

I’ve never been much for goal setting, though I’ve never been entirely sure why. Whether it has something to do with the fleeting fancies of ADHD or the feeling that somehow, if I don’t complete everything on it, I’m some sort of a failure, I’ve never been able to stick out my goals & make actual steps towards their achievement. That’s not to say I never meet my goals, but for some reason there’s a sterile pressure around the idea & practice of goal setting; it feels oddly corporate or cheesy, like something you do in a quarterly review with a higher up who really doesn’t care whether or not your aspirations are met. I guess a part of me still attributes goal setting to the academic setting, a worksheet to hand in for trivial credit that never actually amounts to much.

If you’ve read my previous blogs that were written around the transition between the old & new year, you’ll see that I also am not an advocate for the new year’s resolution, nor for that matter is science. Simply stated, they don’t work, they fizzle out. To some degree I’d say I feel the same about goal setting. In all honesty, I’m sure, if you’re like me, that you saw the title of this blog about “goal setting” & probably didn’t even click the link. I guess we’ll never know though seeing as the simple window shopping didn't come in to investigate.

This past year both myself & my lovely friend, Kate Cosentino, came across the same TikTok around the same week. It was a woman talking about how she, like me, hated the traditional form of goal setting & why said past goal setting attempts didn't work for her. Her approach, instead, was that of a guest who had previously appeared on the Oprah Winfrey Show. If their segment they talked about vision boards & what to do with them/how to place & arrange them in a way that allows you to use them towards the aims you were after. Their method was quarterly, requiring a new vision board every three months, & asked you, not only, to visualize your board on the front, but also to write your visions & goals out on the back. In this way it was similar to the “Mind Movies” that Dr Joe Dispenza uses in his seminars to teach shifting perspective & mental energy in alignment with the things you desire. As aforementioned, the vision board you’ve created is meant to be revisited on a quarterly basis, the only difference from your first board being that you are meant to review & revise.

Let’s say you put on your vision board that you want to rekindle a relationship with your parents. If at the end of Q1 you’ve made attempts & gotten no where near where you want to be you write on the back of your Q2 vision board the same goal emphasizing the things that worked & writing & evaluating a new path forward. I suppose it’s also worth mentioning that you’re meant to write how you plan to go about your visions on the back of the Q1 board.

Another major component of the vision boarding is that you’re meant to do so with a group & share your vision board with said group when you are finished. The day Kate & I came across out vision board TikTok we both planned an evening with Kimi Most & Evan to create together & share. This outward expression of your desires helps to get the word out, it helps to solidify the things you want in the words you say. After all, how can it be known what you want if you won’t ask? In this way it gets you accustomed to speaking on your wants, your shortcomings, & your plans with those who will love & nurture you along the way. It also allows people the chance to help you if something comes up on your board that they feel they have insight on.

So how did my vision boarding go? How did it turn out. Well, much like I mentioned above with goal setting, we all fell off the wagon. We did the one evening of work & then never followed up with the next three quarterly reports. That’s not to say it was a failure though as yet another aspect of this vision board journey is that you place your board somewhere you see it daily & somewhere people who enter your home will see it & can ask you about it. Again, the goal is to talk about the things you want, to keep them at the forefront of your mind so that they become the magnetic north that guides your internal compass. Mine & Evan’s have been in the kitchen, right next to the place where we consume majority of our meals. Both boards are highly visible & both have been talked about openly amongst each other, friend, & the like. I’d say of the twenty-five things I have on my board, around seven of them came true in one form or another. That’s not bad for not following the program to the letter you’re supposed to.

So why do I draw attention to all of this? Why do I talk vision boards, goals, & the steps it takes to actualize them? Well, because I’d like to, if I may, use the last half of this blog as a digital vision board, so to speak. I’m sure in the type format it will come out looking more like a goals list but I promise you, on the other end of this I will be making a vision board to represent all of the things listed below & probably more. I’m doing this here as a form of accountability. We’re meant to share & talk about our dreams & that’s what I’m doing here. I’d also like, if you may, for you to remind me to revisit this quarterly, checking off & adjusting as we go along!

I wish you all the happiest of new years, filled to the brim with love & joy!

As always, much love to you all!

-C

Charlie’s 2023 Digital Vision Board

-Sign A Publishing Deal (Smack, Universal, Warner Chapel)

-Get At Least Five Outside Cuts

-Tour As An Opener For A Larger Act

-Sign With A Talent Agency (WME, CAA, ACA)

-Get Paid To Travel

-Get Paid To Promote The Products I Already Use

-Cross Two More Continents Off The Total Seven (Still Need South America, Australia, Africa, & Antarctica)

-Release A Minimum Of One Song Per Quarter

-Get Verified Across All Social Platforms

-Grow Creatively

-Help More People

-Get Social Numbers Up (Instagram 20K BYE, TIKTOK 10K BYE, ETC)

-Get 1K Spotify Followers

-Get On Editorial Playlists For Spotify & Apple Music

-Visit Japan

-See The Northern Lights (Preferably In Iceland)

-Become A Master Diver

-Have At Least One Song Trend

-Write More Honest Lyrics

-Cut Medicine Written By Harry Styles

-Do More Features

-Add At Least Five More Michelin Stars To My Belt

-Find Daily Moments Of Gratitude

-Get Back Into Eating In A Healthier Manner

-Hit The Gym At Least Four Times A Week

-Walk My Dogs More

-Spend More Time With The People Who Bring Me Joy & Less With Those Who Don’t

-Find A Consistent Form Of Financial Freedom That’s Not Soul Sucking

-Embrace The Unknown

Travel Blog: Indonesia: Part Three- Another Day, Another Nat Geo Experience

Welcome back world travelers! We’ve made it, this is the final entry in my Indonesia series revolving around the Lembeh Strait! I hope you’ve enjoyed the journey thus far & are ready to dive (see what I did there) into our final segment today! If you’re not all caught up on my escapades, no worries, I’ll link the other two installments right below this introductory paragraph! Enough of the pretext, shall we continue?

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INDONESIA

PART THREE:

Day Five

Woke to another lovely day on Lembeh. The rain that rolled in over night had cooled the morning leisurely to somewhere in the low 80s. My breakfast consisted of my same morning staples; Jasmine Tea, Raspberry, Nutella Toast, Eggs, Bacon or Sausage, Fruit, & Fresh Juice. I think this is the morning I subbed one of the aforementioned items out for Granola topped in Yogurt, Honey, & Chopped Fruit, but that’s neither here nor there. No interesting creatures came out to play either while dinning or while making our way down the dock, however, that’s not to say the day wasn’t interesting. Far from it!

Remember in the last blog when I mentioned that I lost track of our dive sites at a certain point. Well folks, we’ve reached the pinnacle of it as, in my dive log, the next two days are full of sites that were already programed into the SSI app so I didn’t have to deal with the grueling entry process for each site. There are a few, especially the last couple days that I have written down, so we shall return to form when we get there!

Dive #1 of the day was a muck dive & deep one at that. Set at off the shore from Makawide, I remember descending the slope with Sam & Puri (if you don’t know who these people are at this point, you haven’t been paying attention) & feeling like we were fairly deep. The thing about muck diving is that most of the critters typically are fairly muted in their color pallet & if they aren’t, you’re usually using a flashlight to spot them anyway which restores their full color. This is much more noticeable on reefs where the many colored corals seem to all fade to shades of blues & blacks. All of that being a round about way of saying that I didn’t notice we’d dropped down to almost 107ft until I looked at my dive computer & was immediately aghast at what I saw. I even got Sam’s attention to show her & she gave me a “shocked eye” stare back at my readings. Was the depth worth it? Absolutely.

I’m going to sidebar again, sorry you’re dealing with an ADHD riddled writer here, but when I was in Fiji I got my deep water certification & remember telling my father later that I didn’t really have much of a desire to dive that deep again. It drastically cuts your dive time &, in Fiji at least, there wasn’t much to see & all the coloration was gone. Muck diving is truly a different animal I guess!

So what did we find at that depth? We found one of the rarer Lembeh creatures. Not only that, but we sat & watched it hunt.

At a depth of around 90 feet we found the highly sought after Rhinoceros Scorpionfish. The Rhinoceros is a marvelous creature that is uncharacteristically colorful compared to the rest of the Scorpion/Stonefish family. Having evolved to look like a dead leaf, they sway back & forth on modified pectoral fins as they inch across the substrate mimicking the movement of a leaf caught in the sway of the tides. Our Rhinoceros was bright orange & was in the process of hunting a cardinal fish. So, of course we had to sit & watch!

We sat, anchored to the bottom for around ten minutes just watching this fish play coy as it gained footing on its prey inchmeal. We gingerly made our way along with it, being sure to keep it in frame & in light so that we would catch the end of its successful hunt on camera, & that’s exactly what we did! Finally after coming within two inches of the cardinal the scorpion struck. It did so at a rate that my camera, running 120 frames per second, only managed to snag one or two frames of its extended jaws.

Funny enough, while we were pursuing the scorpionfish another ambush predator decided to wriggle its way between Sam & I. A massive Lionfish decided it had had enough of us scaring off any further perspective prey & made its complaints known as it grumpily swam between us.

This dive was a gold mine, in addition to the Scorpionfish we saw another Gurnard skidding across the bottom & two massive Titan Triggerfish, which we were sure to steer well clear of. They bite. Hard.

The most exciting find of the dive, especially for Puri, was the gigantic Sea Turtle we came across resting on the bottom around 40 feet. This turtle was one of the largest I’d seen in the wild & Puri was overjoyed as apparently they hadn’t seen any turtles in a good long while. We tried not to disturb it but it took off as soon as we got within 10-15 feet of it.

Farther up the slope, towards the beginning was a reef that sat just under the water line. Here we found the typical Anemones & Clowns, Damsels, Tangs, etc., but we also found another Sea Crete & several large Yellow Trumpetfish.

For the next dive we headed back towards the resort to a small archipelago of islands. Apparently their name in Indonesian roughly translated to something along the lines of “The Broken Islands” because they used to be a part of one singular mass of land, instead of their own separate entities. We loaded up on our typical rest food & drink items (tea, coffee, water, milo, cake, & fruit) & were just about to get back in the water when I was handed a guitar.

Apparently someone let it slip that I am a singer & the crew had brought a guitar to get me to perform for them. I reluctantly agreed & sat tuning the instrument for a minute before I played them one of my originals which they absolutely adored. I felt so honored & handed back the guitar before I got all of my gear on & was once again down in the blue.

Dive #2 was part reef & part rubble which meant high possibilities for octopus which we did in fact end up finding in the aptly named site, Critter Hunt! What’s our octopus count at this point? Three? Well, this was number four if that’s the case! It was also another unique species from the other three & another highly sought after Lembeh animal. We had stumbled upon a Wonderpus.

Yes, that’s its real name, the Wonderpus which happened to also be the name of our boat for the week. What makes the wonderpus so wonderful you ask? For that I want to divert to a short anecdote that Kim, the resort manager, told us. Kim is a Danish gent who has lived in the Lembeh area for well over 15-20 years. He said that the first time he saw a wonderpus he didn’t think anything of it, in fact, he thought it was a lion fish. How does one confuse an octopus with a lion fish? Well the wonderpus, similar to the mimic, another Lembeh favorite, can do exactly that. It can mimic. Only the wonderpus has the keen ability to alter the texture of its skin along with the length, shape, etc. of its arms & body. Our wonderpus presented to us as white & black striped with big arching brows.

I was, unfortunately, once again pulled away from my Garden Eels to come look at the octopus, but I think it was an acceptable replacement. They did let me sit & watch the garden eels afterwards for a few minutes, so I truly can’t be mad.

Additionally we came across some lovely clusters of Frogspawn Coral, some Snowflake Eels, Coral Gobies, Cowfish, Fingered Dragonettes, Panther Grouper, & I once again attempted to get a Cleaner Wrasse to clean my mouth. It didn’t work, sadly. One of these day, one of these days.

Back to shore we went where I grabbed another Pocari Sweat & sat editing til it was time for lunch & then until it was time to hit dive #3.

Dive #3 at Pintu Colada started at a sparse reef with some monumental mounds of coral. However, that’s not where we spent the majority of this dive. We spent the majority of this dive pestering Male Ribbon Eels.

For whatever reason Ribbon Eels seem to be very curious creatures. I noticed, as I was filming one of the electric blue males that he was very interested in my pointer that I had buried in the ground. I unmoored myself & passed the baton closer to the eel so that it could investigate. The eel would come pretty far out of its den to ‘smell’ the titanium stick I was using, I would get it close & then slowly inch it backwards to see just how far out they were wiling to chase the blue rod & the answer seemed pretty damn far!

Additionally this site had many Chocolate Chip Starfish, several rather aggressive Maroon Clownfish in their Bubbletip Anemones, & some type of buried Moray that I have scoured the internet for but come up blank on its identification.

Our afternoon, post dive, was fairly uneventful. I most likely spent the entirety of it, you guessed it, editing but that’s not to say the interesting parts of the day were over. Oh how wrong that assumption would be because folks, this was a four dive day. We still have the black water dive to talk about.

Now a black water dive comes in a variety of forms. Some where you’re out in the middle of the water attached to a line, letting the little critters come up to you, some where you are sat on the bottom around a light referred to as a “bonfire,” ours was a version of the latter. You see, typically the crew would go out before hand & plant the “bonfire” around 20-30 minutes in advance so that it has time to draw everything in. The problem with this is that it has the high tendency to lead to boredom. We hybridized our black water with just your standard night dive, deciding to plant & ignite the bonfire, the let it set for a while while we went around exploring & poking around in the dark.

We found ourselves some Fuzzy Dwarf Lionfish, a Gorilla Crab or two, large quantities of Pipefish, a Blue Spotted Ray, an Orange Blotch Rabbitfish, some Porcupine Puffers, Banded Coral Shrimp, & a baby Barramundi (Sweet Lips). The real prize of the dive, however, were the squid.

We were back out at Aer Prang where we’d dove a few times before & done our previous night dive. Just off the clusters of Trumpet Coral Puri spotted them, two Squid suspended in the water. As we got closer their colors began to shift & change & each of the pigment cells along their body began to light up. One of the squid decided it best to try & gfto & inked, though it didn’t then attempt to flee. We swam around filming these two squid for a good 10-15 minutes before we decided it was best to leave them be & return to the bonfire. However, on the way we encountered a hand made fish trap teeming with captured fish. We all had the same thought in wanting to set the fish go, especially since the trap didn’t seem to have a line or anything attached to it, but we felt it best to leave it incase it was a local’s meal.

I mentioned briefly in the previous blog about night diving the tiny little plankton & organisms that you find while night diving. At one point, after returning to the bonfire, I held my flashlight straight upright & just watched the different varieties of life dancing in & out of the beam. We came across several free swimming crustaceans & Puri found some kind of mostly translucent organism that looked not dissimilar to the double helix of DNA.

We returned to the resort after another bulging day of diving, showered, scarfed down an incredible dinner, & were out before our heads hit the pillows.

End Of Day Five

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Day Six

It was time to start winding down, after a full week of diving at this point our dives were starting to become a little more sparse on these our last two days. If you’re unaware, when diving, you need an 18-24 hour period between the time of your last dive & the time of your flight. This is to help prevent the bends. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

I assume you know the drill at this point? Wake up, breakfast of eggs, fruit, bacon or sausage, toast, fresh juice, etc. I suppose I forgot to mention that earlier in the week the kitchen staff had found me a fresh Jackfruit, of which they continued to serve at any meal they knew I’d be at because I was one of the only few dining upon it. Most meals would end with a bowl full of jackfruit, covered in Calamansi Juice. After breakie & gathering the dive gear & camera I took with me off of the boat, it was once again time to dive. Today’s dock creature was a Spadefish, bobbing along the surface in-between the dock & the Wonderpus, our boat.

Our first dive of the day was a rubbly coral spot called Nudi Retread. It was home to many Blue-Spotted Stingrays, some beautiful Maze Corals, many Giant Clams, & even a few big ole Leopard Sea Cucumbers. It’s here where we found a pair of Tozeuma Shrimp but, you guessed it, my camera said “Tozeuma Shrimp who? I’m more interested in this plain old background behind them.”

The site also, of course, had its fair share of Bubble Coral, Anemones con Clowns, Sea Fans, & even a Miniatus Grouper with its bright blue spotted red body.

After we surfaced we headed off to dive #2, set off the island chain in the middle of Lembeh.

Dive two was a reef dive, Sarena Patah. Amongst the reef I once again tried my hand at getting Cleaner Wrasse to excavate my mouth to no avail, found many Tiger Jawfish popping their heads out of the sand, a mating pair of Singapore Angelfish, a school of Pajama Cardinal fish, some Moorish Idols & a Mosaic Pufferfish. After our time below the surface it was time to head back to NAD Lembeh for lunch & my daily ritual of editing over a Pocari Sweat.

Our third dive was at Tanjung Kusu-Kusu or Cape Kusu-Kusu as it would be in Ingles. It was another muck dive location with sparse reef near the two. Immediately upon our decent we discovered a pair of Spiny Tiger Shrimp hiding in a cup sponge. Puri was very excited at the find & wrote on his tablet “Tiger Shrimp” followed by “a very special shrimp.” The shrimp were about an inch in length & were covered in white spikes. The white body of the shrimp had orange spots on it surrounded by smaller black spots & while the resemblance to a tiger is iffy, I can understand why it was so named to a degree.

The dive was also full of many Lionfish & Scorpionfish though the coolest thing we discovered PSTS (Post Spiny Tiger Shrimp) was a rock covered in a microcosm of predator & prey.

All along this little portion of reef, about the size of a Fiat, were schools & schools of Cardinalfish. I’m talking hundreds if not thousands of them, all tucked in the rock & poking out just a tad. Below the school, patiently waiting was a Stonefish blending perfectly into the rock work where it perched, just waiting for one of the cardinals to dip a little bit too close. Just around the rock, under where the stonefish sat was a White Mouth Moray Eel, farther around on the other side of the rocks there was a Ribbon Eel, & amongst the rock there were assorted Dwarf Lionfish & Scorpions.

Though we didn’t end up doing a dive in the evening, that doesn’t mean I was done with aquatic life for the day. In fact, I got a glimpse of some aquatic wildlife on the shore during our leave. No, that’s not a typo, ‘on’ is the correct use here.

Along the beach of our little bay I started to notice little pricks of movement. My initial thought was that it was crabs or some other burrowing crustacean but I was wrong & was so excited to find what it actually was. All along the shore line, on the beach, were about ten Mudskippers. Mudskippers are a type of goby that has evolved to move, in a limited capacity, on land. They come out of the water to feed on the insects that congregate near the shoreline & can be out of water for around two days! Funny enough the Indonesian name for the mudskipper is ‘Ikan Tambio’ which means “prostitute fish” though I can’t for the life of me figure out why they are so named.

Darin, our trip guide & owner of Midwest Aquatics, the dive shop I went through for my certification, Fiji, & Indonesia, had asked previously if we could do a village excursion or something of the like on land. He & Simon came to the conclusion that it probably wasn’t for the best of the group & instead decided on a sunset cruise for the lot of us! The Wonderpus had been stripped of our gear, wiped down, dried out, & instead was packed with coolers with drinks & bowls of snacks

We went all the way up the strait to a village where the locals were farming pearls, the children rushed out into the water yelling any english phrases they could think of to get our attention & we affectionately waved back & yelled “hello” to them on the shore. Once we passed the lighthouse into the mouth of the strait it was revealed that it was Darin’s birthday & his lovely wife & incredibly talented photographer, Cari had requested a cake from the kitchen to bring aboard. We all sang “Happy Birthday” & slices of the cake were passed around before we turned back & headed towards the south end of the strait.

Along the way I was once again passed the guitar but I opted for soft covers & what I call “call to prayer” guitar just to fill the space with something atmospheric & not make it the “Charlie Rogers Show” on someone else’s day.

As we neared Bitung we began to hear & see the music festival that had been going on throughout the week. Spotlights scraped the clouds & music ricocheted across the water with thunderous bass that was soon replaced by actual thunder as a storm rolled in. We all ducked for shelter as if we hadn’t just spent the last week completely drenched & the boat made its way back to shore where showers, dinner, & beds awaited us all.

End Of Day Six

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Day Seven

Well, we’re here, the last day of dives for this trip. Have we had fun? Have we enjoyed the ride? I promise you it’s not over yet! Like I said, we still have one more day of diving!

The morning started unceremoniously with the typical wake & break…fast, followed by the morning pack up, & walk down to the dock. There weren’t any dock critters of interest this morning, but we’ll get back to that in the afternoon! Our first dive was Hairy Larry, so named, apparently, because of the hairy diver guide that “discovered” & named it. One thing is for sure, Mr. Larry had found himself a gorgeous reef & wall dive.

The afternoon prior we’d been asked by the guides what we wanted our last day of diving to look like, the general consensus was something a little more reef forward but still balanced with muck & rubble, so that’s what the guides delivered!

We were dropped into the site at the top of the reef. Immediately we were greeted by Honeycomb Grouper, tons of Clowns & Anemones with Benggai Cardinalfish hovering near by, Squirrelfish, Bicolored Angelfish, & even another Day Octopus!

The wall portion of the dive was at around 60-70 feet. It was stacked corals overlooking a sandy forever with a multitude of fish, nudibranchs, & other invertebrates ducking in & out of their high rise hovels. The wall was home to hundreds of varieties of Torch Corals, a Blue Spiny Lobster, & large Granulated Seastars.

As we made our way from the wall, through the rubble downslope from the reef, Puri started picking through the dead coral in search of a very specific score. Puri was searching for Mosaic Boxer/Pompom Crabs. A boxer crab is a wee crustacean about the size of your thumb nail. Their name is derived from the itty bitty anemones they carry in their claws & use to sweep the water for microscopic food, which they then pilfer from the anemones. As Puri was scouting the rock a very interested, very large Sunset Wrasse came over to see if we kicked up anything edible for him. He didn’t seem at all afraid of us divers & in fact was very keen to hang out & remained very close to us the entirety of our search.

Puri eventually did find a boxer crab which he brought over to a large rock on the branch of deceased coral it had been occupying. We three gathered around the rock & Deb & her guide even joined us. We all sat watching the pompom swipe the water & feed. As we were watching it another of the guides cut through us & placed a second pompom crab on the rock with the one we were observing.

I’m still beyond amazed at the eyes on these Indonesian guides. All week they were able to find the smallest of creatures in often the dimmest of lighting. Each of them would point out things that it would often take my eyes thirty seconds to a minute to focus on. The crabs are a great example of this.

After we left the crustaceans to their filter feeding I ran into a Foxface, a few massive schools of Green Chromis, a Naso Tang, many more Bubbletip Anemones.

Once we were back on the reef we immediately noticed the innumerable Giant Clams that dotted the coralscape. Blues, browns, greens, any color, variety, & size you can think of, they were there. I found a Common Egg Cowry feeding on some Leather Coral, which if you remember from my Fiji blog was one of my favorite finds simply because of the striking nature of its deep, black pigment.

The reef was mostly stoney corals & leathers; Birds Nest, Antler Coral, Trumpet Coral, Maze Coral, etc. Amongst these I found a Scopas Tang, two big ole Lobsters, a brown Trumpetfish, Hawkfish, & a Triangle Butterflyfish. I had a really had time returning to the surface because I felt everywhere I turned there were new things to see.

Dive #2 took us back near the site of the previous to a site called Makawidey Pier. The other dive boat, the Mimic, joined us at the site where we sat side by side enjoying the surface interval. About halfway through it I was once again handed the guitar. This time the crew was asking that I perform a mini set for them of anywhere from 3-5 songs. It’s always funny to me how when you’re put on the spot your mind completely blanks on what songs you have available in your catalog, but I did manage to pull out a few more songs for the crew that had worked so hard on our behalf throughout the week.

Makawidey was half reef & half muck. Once we were down we immediately began to find incredible creatures!

We almost landed right on top of a Blue-Spotted Stingray when we entered. It hightailed it out of our vicinity, literally. We headed down father & found three separate Seahorses all within 100 ft of each other; one white & one a light grey, & one with red stripes. Additionally I spend a little more time pestering Ribbon Eels.

The muck eventually gave way to reef where we found a pair of Scissortail Gobies, a Golden Rabbitfish, Benggai Cardinals with babies in their mouthes, a White Mouth Moray Eel, a gigantic field of Pulsing Xenia, & Hammer Coral as far as the eye can see.

I mean that last bit literally, the hammer coral must have covered the length of a football field, it took my breath away. I kept thinking back to the aquarium hobbyists who would kill for just a single head of it. Typically a small head of hammer coral starts are $50 & that’s for something the size of a nickel.

After our second dive we were off to the resort for, what would be the rest of the time for a lot of people. There was no afternoon dive on this day but that didn’t stop me from feeding my saltwater soul a few more times before we left.

In lieu of a dive I took myself snorkeling/freediving. NAD Lembeh Resort has a lovely little house reef that I felt I needed to explore before we departed. I’d spent my week peering into the water & remarking at the wildlife from the dock so I decided to get a closer look.

I didn’t find much on the south end of the reef, but when I got closer to the dock my luck started to change. The dock itself was covered in Long Spine Sea Urchins. As I was (cautiously) passing through the legs of the pier I saw a Triggerfish that I still have yet to identify. The reef on the north end of the resort was flourishing; Clams, schools of Pipefish, Trumpetfish, & Anthias all dotted the rock work. When I got back towards the dock I found an Angelfish upside down picking at the floatation devices, a school of Batfish, & even a few little Boxfish. All just from hopping in the water 100 feet from where I’d been sleeping the last week. Around 4:30 we loaded up the dive boat one last time & headed out.

Yes, I said there was no afternoon dive BUT there was an early evening one! This was a dive I’d been looking forward to all week long. We were going on a Mandarin Goby dive!

Mandarin Gobies, Seahorses, Garden Eels, Cleaner Wrasse, all my obsession. I hadn’t seen a single mandarin the entirety of our trip & it was really starting to bum me out because they’re one of my all time favorite fish & there we were about to do a whole dive dedicated to them.

The mandarin dive takes place in a bay called Bianca, it’s named after the boat, The Bianca, that has been anchored there for a few decades now. The dive is a stationary dive, meaning that you sit on the bottom & wait for the things to come to you. So sit & wait we did.

The dive takes place at twilight, right when the sun has sunk below the horizon. We were all kneeling around a cluster of broken coral waiting. You aren’t allowed to use the full brightness of your torch & red light is mandatory.

So there we sat, waiting on mandarin gobies. Then, almost all at once, they started to pop out of the coral debris, they seemed to come from everywhere. The larger females would come out, flare up a little bit, & the smaller males would come pouring out in an attempt to gain her affections. Once she’d found one she liked they’d do a courtship dance where they rose up in the water, hooked together side by side. Then on cue they’d both release (& release) & depart from one another. The largest female in the area did this with around six different males.

As the light faded more & more fish began to emerge from the rubble including an assortment of Clown Gobies. They perched on the rock watching us watch the mandarins. There were green ones & black ones & one very large Citron one. I went to point them out to the people to my right but their guide had motioned for them to leave & they ended up decimating the rubble bed in their wake sending the clown gobies scattering in all directions.

Upon our return we were greeted by a barbecue, the staff had taken the tables & chairs from the dinning hall & arranged them in a line between the entrance & the bar. In the middle of the table were several plates of sashimi fresh caught that day & at the end were an arrangement of grills & griddles all boasting different assortments of meats & vegetables.

We enjoyed the food in mixed company, mingling with a group of snorkelers out of England who had come to the resort on a snorkel tour, something I was unaware was a thing. We all dined & exchanged stories, us at the end of our week, them just a few days into theirs. After we supped a cake was passed around the table.

With bursting bellies & smiling faces we adjourned to bed where we drifted off to sleep before the next day’s conquest home began.

End Of Day Seven

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Day Eight

I debated on whether or not I wanted to include “day eight” as if was a travel day. Then upon reflection I found myself remembering many interesting things about the day. The odd part about writing this is that it will butt up into my Singapore Blog which I actually decided to publish in advance before going back to do the dive blogs. You can find a link to it at the very end of this blog.

We slept in a little on this day. Not having to beat the clock to get breakfast in before our dive time, we enjoyed a leisurely morning. After we had our fill of breakfast we all went back to our separate abodes to pack & make sure our electronics were charged for the return trip back. I was the only member of my group separating from the rest of them & the anxiety of 20+ hours of travel was palpable amongst my compatriots.

We left the resort begrudgingly, just short of noon. The tide was out at the time of our ferry across the strait so when we reached the cement dock on the other side we had to all climb onto the roof of The Wonderpus to get back on land. We all were escorted down the dock where locals came out in droves to observe the foreigners. The children yelled “hi” over & over at us & it was explained that it was probably the only english words they knew. We returned each “hi” in kind, accompanied by a smile of appreciation.

Our convoy to the Manado Airport was a series of minivans driven rambunctiously down the roads. We passed the festival grounds, several markets, & many curious locals who waved or peered into the windows at us. My car was the first to reach the terminal by a long shot & we sat for around 15-20 minutes waiting for the others to arrive with out gear so we could tip our driver.

The waiting game then began as our ticketing agents had not yet shown up. I went out in search of food, finding a Starbucks & a convenience store to satiate me. It was well over an hour & a half before someone showed up to check us in & we were all starting to get nervous that we were going to miss our flight.

Though I was the first in, I was the last out. I had to pay an extra baggage fee for my gear which took a while to process & I ended up being the last member of our group through security which didn’t end up mattering because our flight was delayed.

Ever the curious pallet I wandered into another convenience store while waiting to board & was met by many different Durian products. For the unaware, durian is a type of custardy fruit whose aroma is so pungent it’s often outlawed from Southeast Asian public transport. I was curious, as I always am, & opted for the durian ice cream with fresh durian in it. Y’all. No shame, truly. I regretted it. I kid you not, to my westernized pallet durian tasted like a mix between smelly feet (just assuming that flavor) & gasoline (that one too) with just the slightest banana & mango taste thrown in. The worst part of it was that it then spent the next several hours fighting me & I could not, for whatever reason, clear the taste of it out of my mouth.

Our flight finally departed & we were given a sealed cup of water & a literal entire package of cookies upon boarding.

When we got to Jakarta night had fallen & we all gathered our things before boarding the shuttle that had been arranged to take us to our hotel.

The hotel was around 15 minutes away from the airport & the journey there brought up a rather large discrepancy in the life of the people of Jakarta. From the terminal we were taken on highways, beautiful highways before turning into what I can only describe as shanty towns. We maneuvered around these shanty towns until we came to what had to be a seven or eight foot wall. We traced the wall, dotted with shacks, around to a gate where armed guards let us through two separate gates where the surroundings intently went from impoverished to glistening in excess. If I’m being honest it made me feel icky. We had arranged to stay at the FM7 Resort Hotel for the evening.

The resort was stunning. Modern artwork, pristine flora, exquisite lighting & cleanliness. It was a very sharp contrast to the world just outside of its massive walls. The resort was also a complex, an entire network of buildings & roads spread over a large number of acres. We all checked in & were given our room keys where we all went our separate ways to sleep for only a few hours before our flight from Jakarta departed to Singapore.

End Of Day Eight

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END OF PART THREE

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END OF BLOG

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Travel Blog: Indonesia: Part One-A Plane, A Boat, A Truck, & Diving in the Muck

INDONESIA

PART ONE:

Prologue/Day One

Singapore

We’re starting day one off in the airport, specifically the Singapore Airport where my eighteen hour LA to Singapore leg had come to an end at 1:30 on Monday morning. Regrettable I was unable to get much sleep one the flight so I was dragging. I found an open street food stall in the airport & got a bowl of Wonton Noodle Soup with Veggies. Before finding a spot to crash I stopped at the in airport 7/11 for something to drink & some candy as well as the airport Butterfly Garden & Cactus Garden. I found a spot behind a row of seats to bunk down for a few hours before my flight to Jakarta was set to take off at 6 am. By the time I’d setting in for my nap the time was around 3 am.

It was, unfortunately, short lived. Apparently a section full of people napping is the perfect place to take a phone call & play with your toddler, as the woman who loudly sad beside me somehow discerned. Having slept only around 30-45 minutes I begrudgingly gathered my things & went in search of caffeine.

I’d switched from coffee to tea a few weeks prior so when I ordered a lemon black iced tea at what was now just short of 5 AM, the sleepy barista looked at me like I had three heads. It truly didn't cross my brain until I’d left the region entirely that I was smack in the center of part of the coffee world, literally about to board a flight to the island of Java. Hindsight is 20/20 as they say & next time I’ll be sure to scout coffee options.

The rest of my dive crew joined me just after I downed my tea & right around the time our gate & security opened to let us through to the gate waiting area. The Singapore Airport does this interesting thing where there is minimal security when simply entering the terminal, but each gate is glassed off with its own private security line that you can reserve a specific time to be in if you plan in advance. We all got through security, I paid Deb the $3 I owed her still from Fiji & we promptly boarded shortly there after.

Indonesia

I had managed to book a window seat into Jakarta though it was in the far back of the Singapore Airlines plane, the seats get more & more narrow the farther back you go. I slept majority of the hour long flight but woke in time for the in flight meal of Chicken Congee, which made me question why I don’t make Congee more often.

Once we began our decent into Jakarta I noticed something interesting, rows & rows of something out in the ocean just off shore. Later I would find out that those were pearl farms after boating by a few in Lembeh Strait.

We had a four hour layover in Jakarta & while we thought it would be a casual stroll through the airpark, we ended up needing every minute of it.

The first hurtle was immigration, we got in one line just to be told it was wrong once we got up to the front, then we went over to buy a 30-day visa for $30 USD, which then had the be taken back to the original line. Our baggage took a while to collect, coming out in spurts in ten minute intervals, though Joe & my dive partner/roomie, Sam’s, bags didn’t end up making it entirely. We waited while they filled out the missing bag reports, then we started to make our way through customs.

I don’t know why I found the immigration/customs process in Indonesia so intimidating, but it was. Everything was taken very seriously, each little form had to be filled out precisely or the officer viewing it would throw a fit, the only other similar customs experience I’ve had was entering The US at BNA from The UK.

Once we were all through customs we had to board a monorail to a different terminal, of which, the directions for use were very confusing, but we made it, though half of our group got separated trying to figure out the sky rail system.

The local terminal was overwhelming with, once again, little to no direction on where exactly you’re supposed to go. Have you ever seen the pictures of Kathmandu, Nepal where the streets are just wall to wall people, buggies, & vehicles? That’s what the local terminal at Jakarta International felt like. It was especially overwhelming trying to roll suitcases & bags through in addition to everyone basically being in the same attire from the soccer/football match the evening prior.

We finally found where we needed to be & stood in line to check in for Batik Airways. This took some time. The problem was that everyone in the group, with the exception of Sam & I were on a singular booking, so we had to assemble & check in each of those people as a group, paying the baggages fees individually as they went. The acceptable baggage weight fluctuated between 20 kg & 17 kg depending upon which ticketing agent you asked so some people ended up having to go halfway across the terminal to pay their baggage fee & others ended up getting off scot-free. Once we were all paid & bags were dropped we made our way to our gate.

The gate situation here was similar to Singapore with the gates being the security check point but had more in common with MCI where there were 5-10 gates behind each security check point. Our flight was slightly delayed so I went in search of food. I landed on a coffee stall that had Thai Tea Boba & Coconut Steam buns.

Once we were boarded I’d been resorted to a middle seat in the very back of the aircraft. For the two & a half-three hour flight I sat watching Shang-Chi & passively enjoying the Curried Chicken I’d been given.

Once we’d landed in Manado & gathered our belongings we were shown to cars where our stuff was packed in & two-three of us were shoved in & off we went.

I’ll say this about the Indonesian drivers as a whole, the lane markers seem to only be a suggestion. We cruised across the country side past Gunung Klabat to Bitung where we disembarked from the vans & we ushered through the village to a pier with a small overhead cover where we sat with our gear waiting for a boat, we’d finally made it to Lembeh Strait.

Our chariot was, ironically, one of the dive boats from the resort. We all got in, our bags were passed down & placed in the non-seated areas. The ride across the strait only took around ten minutes & we were greeted at the dock by Simon, the owner of NAD Lembeh Resort.

We were instructed to leave our bags on the boat & head into the bar area where we were meant to fill out the resort & dive paperwork. We were met there by some of the resort staff & a Calamansi beverage of the resort’s creation. While we filled out our paper work our bags were being brought to our rooms & we were briefed on the resort, its amenities, & our dives.

I retired back to my shared room with Sam & we got ourselves sorted before it was time to go back to the main part of the resort for dinner.

NAD has a resort chef named Tommy. Tommy’s job extends not only to evening meals but also includes lunch, breakfast is handled by several of the women on the resort staff. Each meal, no matter the maker, is served buffet style with dessert or fruit being brought out around twenty minutes into the designated meal time. Dinner was always a soup, a salad, several entree options & at least one veggie dish. Our first night Chicken in Yellow Curry was the main course.

Over dinner I remarked to Simon about the various species of “rare” plants scattered around the facilities; A Variegated Philodendron Burle Marks on the check-in desk, several species of rare Monstera, Hoyas, & Pothos & he explained that their gardener is world renowned for going out into the jungle of Indonesia & even discovering new species of plants! He even offered his contact info & told me to contact him about shipping some to The US!

After a delicious dinner we seemed to be reaching our individual points of expiration so we called it an early night, each of us heading off to bed by 8:30 at the latest. I took a rinse off shower in our room’s “shower room” (a literal room whose only purpose was to house the shower) & was out like a light as soon as my head hit the pillow.

End Of Day One

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Day Two

Our boat call was 7:30 AM. Breakfast each morning began service at 6 which consisted of Toast with Jams, Cereal, Fruit, Yogurt, Eggs, Bacon or Sausage, Fresh Juice, & occasionally Nasi Goreng (Indonesia’s National Dish of Fried Rice) or Fried Noodles. I opted for Two Eggs Over Easy on Wheat Toast w/ Chicken Sausage, Fresh Papaya, & Pineapple, along with a Jasmine Tea.

After breakfast it was time to assemble the gear. The staff had come the night prior to retrieve our BCDs (Buoyancy Compensator Device), Dive Computers, Fins, Wetsuits, & Regulators, along with anything else we didn’t want to carry down ourselves the next day. That left me with my Mesh Scuba Bag filled with my Dive Socks, GoPro Kit, Bits & Bobs that I Dive with (Pointer, Torch, Etc.), & my out of suit Swimwear. I topped off my water & climbed into the boat where Sam & I were introduced to Puri, our would-be guide for the week ahead.

Now Puri is an Indonesian gent from just outside of Bitung that I’d place somewhere in his 30s. Whether through natural occurrence or corrective lenses he has dark blue eyes that sit cheerfully atop his stout, dark build. From what I gathered from Puri in the week’s time we spent together he can be a bit of a jokester which is fortunate because his laugh is both cacophonous & infectious.

NAD Lembeh has the benefit of being positioned almost smack dab in the middle of the Lembeh Strait, meaning that a lot of the dive sites were only around a 10-15 minute boat trip from the resort. Our first of which was Pantaic Parigi 1, which translates to Parigi Beach 1.

We started our week of dives off, appropriately, with a muck dive. For those unaware a muck dive differs from other dives by the substrate. A muck dive consists of a soft, muddy bottom & it requires one to have a true handle on their buoyancy because one false kick or move & you kick up the silt ruining the visibility. A lot of muck dives also take place on a slope as you’re on the banks of the strait & could easily swim all the way up on shore if you weren’t careful.

We were briefed & entered at around fifteen feet of water, we hung out there for a minute while we all got used to being submerged again then descended down the slope. I was immediately amazed that half the things Puri had begun pointing out to Sam & I were around the size of a finger nail; translucent Shrimp, little Nudibranchs, Shrimp Gobies buried in the sand. I suppose it’s worth noting, if you hadn’t picked up on it already, that we were diving in trios. Typically resort dives consist of one or two dive guides per group of eight-ish. NAD Lembeh does two per guide so that the small things aren’t missed, the commotion around the animals doesn’t stir up the bottom, & the guides aren’t fighting the visibility to keep their group together.

At one point we came upon a submerged fishing net that had long been abandoned to the bottom of the ocean. That didn’t stop the fish & corals from using it to the best of their abilities. One of the buoys for the net was still holding it aloft while the rest of it sat strewn across the sea bed. There were many corals that had taken root, clusters of Cuttlefish & Octopus eggs covered the netting, schools of Cardinal Fish hid amongst the low netting, Eels & Lionfish used the coverage & camouflage options for hunting, the net was teeming with life.

Farther down we found Medusa Worms hosting Emperor Shrimp, Anemones filled with Clowns, Pufferfish grazing in the muck, a beautifully puffed out Gurnard, & many a Filefish.

I, for once, was the air sucker of the group. I guess being at least a foot-foot & a half taller than the rest of your part will do that. I was getting low on air while Sam & Puri both still had just short of half a tank upon our resurface. This would be the trend for the rest of the trip where usually I am the one with all of their air left over.

Our surface interval was supplemented with Papaya, Pineapple, a Loaf Cake, & your choice of either Coffee, Tea, or Milo (Australian Nesquik). We rehydrated & disbursed the nitrogen from our bodies all while traveling over to Aer Prang 2 which I guess roughly translates to “Air Crash 2” though I don’t believe there’s a plane wreck below the surface, at least not that we saw. Aer Prang 2 sits right next to a water depot which really just looks like a cinderblock building with a thatched roof & a small aqueduct running down the dock to the water. Aer Prang would be a popular destination over the next week, as it is half coral reef/half muck. This was the site that really solidified it for me, this was the site that immediately made the 40+ hours of travel to Indonesia worth it for me. Allow me to explain why.

This is going to truly sound like first world diver problems & to some degree it is but I want to wind things back to Fiji for a second. When I was in Fiji, with the exception of the shark dive, all of the dives we were doing were amongst some of the most beautiful reefs I’ve ever seen. This is not to dissuade you from going to do Beqa because if you have the desire I highly recommend it. Hell, I’d love to go back myself! BUT when you’re diving 2-3 dives a day, all of them, as I mentioned, the most beautiful coral reefs you’ve ever seen, it begins to feel a tad redundant. Told ya, first world diver problems. Indonesia has the benefit of variety. You can go from wall dives to muck dives to massive sprawling reefs to giant rock cathedrals swarming with life, sometimes all within the same dive. I will say the thing that Fiji has over Indonesia is its large aquatic life, something I found myself actually missing in Indonesia from time to time.

At the start of Aer Prang you’re dropped, plop, right into a reef. Anemones, corals, fish, & life abound, then you start to head down another slope into the muck. The benefit of this miss mash is that you get kind of the in-between where the muck & the reef are concerned. You get the fish & invertebrates that live in both or are the reef outcasts. You get things like Cuttlefish & Octopuses, you get things like Seahorses (one of which was pregnant) & Frogfish, you get things like Flasher Dragonettes, Pipefish, & Sea Kraits all while experiencing amazing coral life along the way.

After our second dive we returned to home base where it was lunch time. I grabbed a Pocari Sweat which is a Japanese Sports drink & immediately went to download my footage from the day & start editing.

Lunch was usually a tad on the lighter side since most of us still planned to go out diving a third time in the afternoon & was served alongside a massive plate of fruit; mostly papaya, watermelon, & pineapple. I asked after Jackfruit seeing as it’s one of my favorites & was informed it was the end of the season for them, but they would try to find me one.

Our third dive departed at 2:30 PM each day. In this instance I’m not entirely sure the dive site we ended up at as I got lazy in my dive log & just claimed Aer Prang again instead of creating a whole new site for the SSI app like I’d done the previous two. I can tell you that this site was mostly muck but it featured fields & fields of Goniopora & by fields & fields, I mean as far as was visible in all directions. Amongst the Goniopora we found many resting Lionfish, some Blue Spotted Stingrays, Pipefish, Filefish, Clowns, Anemones, Puffers, etc. One of the coolest things we found in the somewhat faded light was a school of Shrimpfish that when you passed light through them looked like a fire blazing above a Gorgonian.

We returned to the resort & I set about editing once again. If you were unaware on my TikTok & Instagram I post clip videos of my trips as they happens, especially my dives!

The evening rolled around & it was once again time for Tommy’s delicacies & the day’s discussion of who saw what & where! I remember calling it an early night again, having rinsed off earlier & opting to finish up the day’s video in the morning I drifted off to sleep fairly easily.

End Of Day Two

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END OF PART ONE

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Travel Blog: Singapore-Day Drinking My Way Through A Two Day Layover

We’re gonna change this up a little bit. Normally I would post my blogs in chronological order of how they happened, meaning that this should technically be “Part One” of Indonesia. However, as I am currently still in the middle of editing all of my footage from Indonesia, including some things that would fit into the segment of “Part One,” we will instead begin with Singapore as I have all of my photos in order there & won’t have to rush to include them here. That means that next week will be Indonesia: Part One & we’ll return to our chronology from there. Sound good? Too bad. Let’s talk about my two day’s time spent in Singapore!

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SINGAPORE

Day One:

If you read my blog regarding the 40+ hours of travel I had on the front half of my trip you’ll know that initially my plan was to arrive in Singapore two days before Indonesia & enjoy my time then. My plans for that order of events was thrown a wrench when I couldn’t for the life of me find a hotel that wasn’t $600 minimum a night & couldn't figure out why. Turns out that weekend was the Singapore Grand Prix. So instead Singapore moved its pretty little self to the back half of my trip & I proceeded accordingly from there.

I arrived in Singapore from Jakarta at around 8:30 AM, having only gotten around three hours of sleep the night before & another thirty minutes-ish on the plane my original plan was to head towards my hotel & see if they were willing to put me in my room early. By the time I cleared customs/immigration & gathered my things it was pushing 9:30. I pulled some cash out of an ATM & went to hail a cab. I initially tried to book something through “Grab” which is Singapore’s version of Uber but I couldn’t get the app to download so a standard cab ended up being the winner.

My driver was a Malaysian gentlemen whose name I never quite caught as his excitement about having me in his vehicle made it near impossible to distinguish about 60% of the stories he was trying to convey to me. I gentlemen in question was a Muslim missionary who, on many occasions, had come to The US to speak to local Muslim communities here on what it is to represent the faith in The States & how they should spread the message of The Quran amongst their friends & neighbors. He was overjoyed to have an American in his cab & during our near thirty minute ride he went through every story from every city in The US that he could think of at near break neck speed. He dropped me at my hotel, the Hilton Garden Inn- Little India, & I handed him a fifty note for his troubles & enthusiasm.

The Hilton was more than willing to accommodate my early arrival, of which I much appreciated, & put me in a corner room overlooking the city. I didn't realize, however, when the room was booked just how far Little India was from the Downtown Core of Singapore. Leaving the room completely untouched I went back down to the receptionist to see if I could cancel my stay & move closer in town. He was only able to cancel me the following evening as I’d already checked in which was fine by me.

Initially my plan was to get a nap in before going out adventuring but anytime I’m anywhere I haven’t been or am on vacation I always hear the echos of my sister when she was in her early teens telling me “you can sleep when you’re dead.” Probably during some time in which she was trying to get me to go out with her somewhere. So I got dressed from the clothes I’d wore on the plane & went out into the city.

I was desperately craving a workout as the only one I’d gotten in the last week of travel was that which involved hauling dive gear or hauling luggage around an airport, so I headed over to Barry’s Singapore: Raffles Place. Quite the departure from taking a nap, I know. I walked through the vibrant Little India over to the subway where I took the train over to the downtown block. The Barry’s class was difficult, especially having not worked out for a week & some change, but I celebrated its completion with a shake & a “Barry’s Singapore” shirt, along with a hooded tank top that was 40% off which I changed into to get out of my sweaty, post-workout clothing.

Back downstairs I made the decision that I was going to go get some lunch instead of my initial plan of going back to my hotel to change. I wasn’t stinky I promise, plus I brought deodorant. I made my way over to the Civic District but not before passing many incredible buildings in the downtown block, Yueh Hai Ching Temple (the oldest temple in Singapore, & Boat Quay (a river front restaurant district). I was making my way over to Sing Swee Kee to try Singapore Chicken & Rice! Along the trek I stopped at the Raffles City Shopping Centre just to walk about & gather some AC before continuing on to the restaurant.

I was greeted exuberantly when I walked in, by literally everyone working the restaurant. They all wanted to make sure I was in the right place & wasn’t just some lost tourist who had wandered into a random chicken shop. I was sat right by the kitchen & brought a cup of chilled Ginger/Pandan Tea & a cup of Clear Broth Soup. I asked the first waitress what to order, she had me get traditional Boiled Chicken & Veggies with Rice Balls, the second waitress added the insistence of Fish Maw Soup with Chicken Collagen so I agreed. The food was incredible, simple as can be but bursting with flavor. I didn’t realize it at the time but the stall has been operating out of the same location since the early 1970s. I even bought a jar of their chili sauce to bring home much to the owner’s surprise who was shocked I could even make it through eating it atop my lunch.

After lunch I made my way towards the Mandarin Oriental Hotel because their bar, MO Bar, made the list of the Top 100 Bars in the World as well as the Top 10 Bars in all of Asia in addition to it being the only of the several in Singapore that made that list to be open on a Monday. Along the way I encountered the remnants of the Grand Prix that had jumbled up my trip & passed through yet another mall to take in the AC.

I arrived at the Mandarin Oriental where I asked the concierge for directions to the bar, I was instructed over to the elevator feeling far too underdressed to even be setting foot in the hotel, much less its award winning bar. I was greeted at MO Bar by a lovely hostess who sat me at an upright along the window overlooking the bay. I then received the spiel about the cocktails & the bar itself. Each of the drinks on MO’s incredible fun bar menu (even the online version is cool) is meant to pay homage to a specific country in Asia & the local ingredients found there. The physical bar menu is set up almost like a 3D constellation map with lighter drinks on one side & the more boozy on the other.

I was served some Wasabi Chips, a bowl of Chevda, & some sparkling water before I ordered a Full Moon, a drink with Rum, Wheatgrass, & Pear topped with a Sugar Film Moon based on South Korea. I will say, of the drinks I had during my time spent at MO Bar, I think this one was my least favorite. That’s not to say the drink was bad by any stretch of the imagination, in fact it was excellent, those that followed were just more so.

My next drink was a Honeybee; a Honey, Whiskey, Kumquat drink, at the bartender’s request. It was an excellent, heart warming, & frothy tribute to Penang that was served inside a black marble cup, of which I still would love a set for my home bar, along side the perfect accent of grapefruit which really brought an interesting quality to the beverage.

After I’d finished by second drink I struck up a conversation with the hostess/waitress who had sat me. We talked about everything from my travels to her life in Singapore & even delved into the Top 100 list they’re feature on, of which, I’ve been to several of the bars listed. I mentioned to her that while my first two drinks were exquisite, I really look for niche cocktails at bars, something that I wouldn’t find anywhere else that maybe imitates of food item or evokes specific feeling, as the cocktails I tend to remember in my travels & life are those that drew from very specific inspiration. Her recommendation was the Satay By The Bay, an homage to the street foods of Singapore, going so far as to include “chicken floss” in the list of ingredients for the cocktail. So I gave it a whirl.

Y’all, when I say this is one of the most fascinating cocktails I’ve ever had I’m not joking. Boasting a “nutty bitterness,” the Gin based twist on a Negroni tastes almost exactly like Chicken Satay with Peanut Sauce, it’s truly incredible. It even has the smokey notes from the charcoal of the grill mixed into it! Additionally I was brought a “taster” of the Afterglow, a Ginger Gin Martini variant with cotton candy (candy floss) melted into it meant to be a tribute to Java. The curious thing about the Afterglow, besides how delicious it is even to a non-martini drinker, is that it really accents the floral notes of the ginger instead of bringing out the traditionally used root, even though the root was what was used.

If I’m being entirely honest, I’m not sure how long I spent at MO. I know when I got there I was at the tail end of afternoon tea & by the time I’d left dinner service had begun to roll out. That’s not to say I didn’t knock back a few more drinks before my departure.

My final drinks of the evening came as a duo as well. I had asked about two cocktails, the Ube & the Annona, both out of my love for the ingredients involved, but since I was preparing to close out my journey down craft cocktail lane I went with the dessert cocktail, the Ube.

The Ube was explained to me as an experimental cocktail, something of a milkshake without the milkshake texture. I’d probably qualify it as some form of a milk tea served with a warm chocolate spring roll. Before the Baguio inspired drink graced my lips however I was served another taster, this time of Annona. Meant to convey Koh Samui, the Annona is a Gimlet twist made from Gin, Soursop, & Pandan. The pandan really is the star of the show here bringing a grassy nuttiness to the understated citrus of the soursop. An excellently balanced cocktail.

My Ube was also served along side a plate of cookies & chocolates from the staff whom I had gotten relatively acquainted with over my several hour stay. I’d shared conversations with the majority of them, gotten their takes & recommendations, & found out a little about their lives in the process. I even informed the bartender, who plays a hand in the crafting of the menu, that I found their menu more enjoyable & more memorable than the vast majority of bars I’d checked off on the Top Bars list, including those ranked in the Top 10 of the world. He hugged me.

I am a massive fan of Jackfruit, as the members of my dive party in Indonesia can attest to, as well as the desserty nature of Ube, a root vegetable similar to Taro or Sweet Potato. The creamy whiskey drink had a lovely lulling quality to it, I almost would have liked to try it warm surrounded by snow.

I payed my tab & departed. I was thanked repeatedly by the staff whom I also returned my gratitude to & was given the sweetest post card, signed by each of the staff whom I’d interacted with over my incredible time at the MO Bar in the Mandarin Oriental Hotel, Singapore.

I was advised to go & see the Supertree light show at the Gardens By The Bay, I figured that since I was within reasonable walking distance & still required sustenance that I would kill two birds with one stone; see the show & get some satay! I crossed The Helix Bridge over the bay & skirted the gardens before cutting in towards the Supertree Grove.

I could hear the music from the outskirts of the park. There were runners everywhere & I was actually under the impression that I was going to be early for the show, turns out I arrived about halfway through it. Now I’ll be the first to admit that typically I find myself underwhelmed by light shows/firework shows/etc. but this was a spectacle to behold. Partially so because of the trees themselves & the hybrid technological marvel/plant housing that they are & partially because of the sense of community it offers. There are people camped out all over the park under the trees, each gazing up to the dazzling display above in wonder. Maybe it was the quantity of drinks or the lack of sleep but it was something undeniably heart warming.

After the light show ended I made my way over to Satay By The Bay…sound familiar?… where I got a fresh pressed Thai Guava Juice & naturally, some satay! The plate I ordered came with two prawns, two pork belly, & eighteen chicken satays along with rice. It was the smallest option. It was also served with a peanuty pineapple sauce that was the bomb! I only ended up being able to eat about half of the plate as I truly wasn’t that hungry, but I knew I needed something on my stomach other than alcohol & sugar to top off the evening.

I walked through the gardens on my way back to the train station which were beyond peaceful in the growing night. There was never a point in which I felt unsafe or nervous walking by myself in the well lit pathways.

My route to the train took me through the Marina Bay Sands where I passed way too many stories up for my fear of height’s liking through the middle of it. I finished my commute back to Little Italy where people where enjoying Chaat in the streets & carrying on amiably as I passed. It kind of make me wished I’d saved what little appetite I’d had for some Roti or something of the like.

I made it back to my hotel, took a much needed shower to wash off the day, & was out before my head hit the pillow, grateful for an incredible first day in Singapore!

End Of Day One

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Day Two

I was awakened at 7:30 AM by the sounds of bells emanating from the Sri Veeramakaliamman Temple adjacent to the hotel. After around thirty minutes straight of tolling, I gave up on sleep & immediately set to packing my things. If you recall from the previous day I was planning to move hotels to something a little closer to the Downtown Core but that wasn’t going to stop me from exploring Little India a bit first.

I’d been advised by multiple different parties that I needed to give Toastbox or Ya Kun a try & get some Kaya Toast. The staff at MO Bar the night before had been adamant about Ya Kun being the superior of the two so I made it may breakfast stop. I found a location just a six minute walk from where I was staying & made my way through the bustling streets of Little India, adorned in decor for Diwali, towards the restaurant.

The location for Ya Kun I found was a small stall set inside a petite mall right next to the Little India Arcade. The venue only had around six or seven small tables total & it was near to full by the time I arrived. I stood at the counter where an old Singaporean woman took my order. I got the Kaya French Toast combo which came with a Milk Coffee & Two Soft Boiled Eggs for around $5. While the woman was cracking my eggs onto a plate she spotted my painted nails.

“Why are your nails painted” she probed?

“Because I enjoy them” I replied with a smile.

She was silent for a moment.

“Someone did them for you?”

"No, I did them myself.”

Without a beat she said: “I can tell.”

I just laughed & she handed me my plate of eggs instructing me on the locations of the sauces before I sat.

My Kaya French Toast & drink didn’t take long to follow, all the while I was scouring the web for a new hotel. Y’all, when I tell you Southeast Asia has been hiding Kaya Butter from us, they have been HIDING KAYA BUTTER FROM US!!!!!

What is Kaya Butter? Well, to put it simply, Kaya Butter is a Coconut Jam. Similar in taste & texture to sweetened condensed milk, I wrapped my meal & immediately went back to the country to buy me a jar for home!

After breakfast I cut through the arcade, sampling snacks & perusing the stalls many of which selling gorgeous, fragrant malas & variant sized statuettes of the many Hindu deities. After circling around Little India one more time, popping in & out of shops & enjoying the wafting incense mixing in the street, I headed back to my room to gather my things & check out.

There’s an awkward time discrepancy in the hotel world. Check out always falls somewhere between 10AM & Noon but check in is never before 3 PM. That’s a long time to wander aimlessly with your bags. Luckily I’d my checkout time wasn’t til noon & I’d thought of a solution. I would return to Barry’s & burn an hour & a half-ish there!

Back to Barry’s I went where I got my ass kicked, literally. It was leg day. After class I got me a smoothy & a few items of 70% off merch I’d missed the day prior! After I hopped back onto the train & made my way towards the Civic District once again where my new hotel awaited me.

My new accommodations were at the Grand Park City Hall, a five star hotel that I’d found a solid deal on due to the renovations undergoing the facility. I entered around an hour early but fortunately the had a room available for me as well as a complimentary upgrade! The room was stunning & while the 6’4” gentlemen that I am may have been remiss about the twin beds, I thoroughly enjoyed the ambiance & little touches that went into my stay there. After getting situated I made my way upstairs to the roof top pool for some rays & a soak before returning to my room to shower & get ready for the evening.

Truthfully I was awaiting a call from Odette notifying me that my waitlist status had been bumped to a table so my dinner plans hinged on it. I made my way over to Chinatown in the interim where I planned to stop at Jigger & Pony, another of the Top 50 Bars, to get a drink & maybe a light bite to eat.

I’d been told by the Google that Jigger & Pony opened at four, so I’d gone just after in hopes of catching a seat sans reservation. Google was wrong, it didn’t open til six, so I returned to a stand I’d passed, Yomie’s Rice X Yogurt, for a refreshing beverage to cool off the heat of the day. I got a fresh Mango & Yogurt drink & sucked it down as I began to walk around Chinatown. I knew I was close to the Buddha Tooth Relic Temple & Museum so I headed off in that direction.

I guess my luck or timing was off that day because I arrived at the temple right around five, at which time it closed apparently. So I took up a seat by the Chinatown Singapore: History & Culture Center, resting my feet that were still screaming at me from the 12+ miles I’d walked on concrete the day before.

After some time spent relaxing & watching the Xiangqi players in the courtyard I came to the realization that I was next to the Chinatown street market. I got up & flitted between the shops even finding an exotic plant stall that made me desperately wish I could bring plants home through customs.

When I’d finished perusing the hour was approaching six & I decided to make my way back towards Jigger & Pony but not before stopping at september coffee for an Iced Black Sesame Latte. Ya boi was crashing. What better solution for the crash than a dim lit bar & alcohol right?!

I was the first person at Jigger & Pony where I was sat at the bar right near the entrance. That’s not to say the bar did not quickly begin to fill with people who had clearly stumbled upon the same list I had & were looking to those “Top 50 in the World” quality cocktails.

At the bartender’s behest I ordered a Madame President, a deconstructed Negroni served with the Campari in lollipop form. The drink was not nearly as dry as I was anticipated with the Campari separated & the Vermouth being a dry instead of sweet variety, I think the orchid & melon liquors really balanced it out. You were meant to sip the cocktail, then take a lick of the lollipop, or whatever other way you wished to enjoy the drink. All I know is I could have had fifty of those Campari Lollipops!

Next I ordered a bit of food, not to over shadow the excellent Wasabi Chips (I see a trend here) that had been served, but I needed something more. So I ordered Deviled Blue Crab Dip served with Smoked Leeks, Sambal Belacan, & Potato Espuma. It smacked.

With the arrival of my dip I diverted course from Gin & found my way to Rum with a Corn Colada. Yes, you read that right, a Corn Colada. I don’t know who thought of it, whose brain said ‘try this out’ but power to them because it was incredibly refreshing. Served a little more like a fizz with egg white the colada swapped out the coconut for butter creating a surprisingly complex mix.

At this point exhaustion was really starting to set in & despite the intrigue the Jigger & Pony menu presented my intuition said it was time for me to call it, so I did, making my way back toward my hotel.

In all honesty I’m kind of glad Odette never called, I don’t think I’d have made it through, I was that tired. I literally went back to my room following my time at Jigger & Pony, packed my things, & fell asleep.

In my defense I had been woken up early & I also had an early flight to catch the next morning needing to be headed to the Singapore Airport around 6 AM.

End Of Day Two

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END OF BLOG

Blog: Travel Blogs & Their Time Table

I know what you’re thinking, ‘um, this is not a travel blog, you just returned from travel, wtf?!’ & you’d be correct, this is not a travel blog though, I assure you, next week’s will be. Why is this not a travel blog? Well, that would be the entire point of this blog you are currently scanning into your brain through your eye holes. I felt it appropriate & incredible important to fill you in on my process & what exactly goes in to each of these travel blogs that you all so lovingly read, because the answer is no short sum.

Again, if you are a reader of my frequent travel blogs, I thank you, from the bottom of my heart. I started them back in May of 2021 with my three part Maui series & have since done everything from The UK (multiple times), Fiji, Disneyland, etc & am currently working on Indonesia & Singapore for your reading enjoyment. However, the thing that I don’t think a lot of people realize from the outside looking in is just how long each of these travel blogs take to formulate & publish.

On an average week I would say that a standard blog takes me around two-three hours to complete, the shorter ones maybe an hour & a half. The travel blogs on the other hand, & any other recommendation blog I do, ends up being around ten hours of work, minimum, outside of the travel itself. I’m sure many of you read that number & though ‘the hell is he spending ten plus hours on in a travel blog?’ & the answers may surprise you.

Aside from the stories themselves, the remembering key events & filing them into an order that makes a coherent & interesting story, I also have to go through & tag each of the locations involved. If you weren’t aware, each time that a location is mentioned in a travel blog of mine, be it a restaurant, bar, hotel, museum, or even just a landmark, the name is a clickable link that takes you to the site of that exact property. Additionally I have to go in & edit each of the photos posted to the blog & often find & pull the ones I forgot to save to my phone that I want to use. Furthermore, logistics with squarespace, the housing site for my site & blog, make it so I have to switch back & forth between my computer & phone to get things uploaded &/or where I want them to be in the blog itself & if in the process of all of this my work gets derailed & I end up having to shift work time to something else, it often leads to a delayed publishing.

That’s why so many of these travel blog entries come out at later dates instead of right on Friday, which I have designated blog days, because I fall behind, or life gets in the way & the blog doesn’t end up being written in time.

So where is my Indonesia blog? Well in all honesty I have been weighing with posting the two day blog of Singapore first before diving, pun intended, into the week’s worth of content I have for Indonesia. I also arrived home around midnight on Wednesday & have not had the time or bandwidth to hash out a ten plus hour blog to post today or for the weekend so instead you get this, my long, drawn out excuse.

Don’t worry, there will be a travel blog post out next week. Whether that ends up being about Indonesia or Singapore remains to be seen, but something will be out, I promise. The scheduling for the postings may end up being a bit wonky as I head into the next couple of weeks & the further travel I have there but I will get them out!

In the meantime I hope you’ve enjoyed this blurb of honesty regarding the life of the blog behind the scenes & if you are at all interested in the adventures I had, I will have TikToks & Reels posted over the next few days from the trip!

Much love to you all,

-C

Blog: Pre-Ji (A Pre-Fiji Blog)

For those of you that don’t follow me on my socials I for starters am not sure how you even made it here, but welcome! Give this a read & go follow me on things! Back to the thought at hand. For those of you that don’t follow me on my socials I am heading to Fiji today! In fact, at the point in which this blog is posted, I will be halfway to Fiji!

Why am I going to Fiji you ask? I’m going on a dive trip! So naturally you can also expect there to be travel blogs the next two weeks! The dive trip I’m going on is through the school that I did my course work for my initial certification through in Kansas, Midwest Aquatics. I’m unfamiliar with the vast majority of people going on the trip with the exception of Kathy, who did my classroom study & pool dives, & Darin, the owner of the dive shop. The trip is a week long & includes fifteen pre-planned dives along with any I want to add in along the way. Part of my diving will be receiving my deep water certification, my night & limited visibility certification & the total number of log dives to secure my rank as an advanced open water diver! In addition I’ll have at least two night dives & a shark dive with a fourteen foot tiger shark named Princess!

In addition to the dives we will also have cultural nights with local Fijians, several excursions to different sites around the islands, in addition to beach hangs & anything else we desire doing. As I sit on my friend Jenna’s couch writing this I am only five hours away from hoping aboard the roughly eleven hour flight.

Why is this the blog topic? Why was last week’s blog topic about why I love to dive so much? To put it plainly, I’m very excited!

Fiji has always been a bucket list destination for me. The culture, the beaches, the marine life, the cuisine, all of it has intrigued me since I was very young & it feels like I’m checking off a very large life goal box by going on this trip.

I’ve gotten the question from a few people who I mentioned the trip to regarding the fact that I am traveling “alone” but I honestly don’t mind it. I feel I’m fairly decent at being able to make friends anywhere I go & as an introvert time spent in solitude, even socially isolated. I am someone who spends a lot of time in my head & I find my time in contemplation very comforting. It allows me to narrow in on my own feelings & thoughts I dive deeper into my understanding of who I am as a person. Part of why I love diving too.

I think I’m going to keep today’s blog fairly brief. If you want to keep up with this adventure I’m embarking on please feel free to follow me on either TikTok or Instagram where I’ll be posting daily vlogs in addition to the travel blogs I’ll be writing here over the next few weeks! If you’re someone who has been missing Object Writing, don’t fear, those will return after I return to Nashville!

Much love to you all! Next time you’ll hear from me will be an ocean away!

-C

Blog: 2021, A Year In Review

So here we are again at the end of another year. I know 2021 was a tough year for a lot of us but at least we had glimmers of hope within the raging storm of the pandemic. I want to take a moment to highlight some of my personal glimmers of hope over the past year in the hope of welcoming in more light in the coming years, not just for myself but also for you, dear reader.

2021 started for me, as it did for many of us, within the fatigue of the pandemic. It also started with the torrent climate of the US political landscape. That’s not why we’re here though, we’re not here to talk about the dark, the muddled, the divisive. We’re here to talk about the hope, the joy, the novel, & the progress.

The first hope of early 2021 I can remember was the distribution of the vaccine. We’d come out of a long COVID riddled winter & were offered the chance, as a society, to change the course of this disease we’d all grown soooooo fond of. The most vulnerable among us were offered that vaccine first, then the on & on it went to it was available to the masses. I personally got both of my vaccinations in March!

Being a newly minted member of the neurodivergent family, something we’ll get more into later, I tend to develop hyper fixations, little things that I find exciting until the dopamine wears out & I move onto the next thing. In early 2021 my first hyper fixation became my home. I looked around & found my house severely lacked things that I felt made it unique to those that lived here. I felt like anyone could have walked into my house & found it hard to pinpoint the exact kind of person that resides within these walls. I decided to introduce a little of what I called “quirk.” I invested in better decor; new lamps, rugs that had subtle Star Wars prints on them, art that hinted at the things I love, etc. Slowly but surely my house began to feel more me.

My next fixation came in the form of self improvement, not a bad fixation to have. I looked inward & found that despite having spent basically the year prior forced into further introspection & was mostly just covering up the things that had been eating me from the inside for so long. I started meditation, I started reading books on psychology, quantum & energetic sciences, even dipping into self help from time to time. I uncovered parts of myself that I had neglected, feelings I’d held onto that no longer served me, & true peace. I fell in love with the natural world around me & with the ghost that lives in the shell that is me.

In the midst of this time of self actualization I found scuba diving. My parents, knowing my deep love for the ocean & all things aquatic, decided it was time I got scuba certified. I know wonder why it took me til almost 30 to get that certification as I immediately fell in love with it.

Around the time of my 29th birthday, my inner work, & scuba certification I also fell in love with plants in a way I never had before. My mother had always been the green thumb of the family & I always leaned more towards the fauna of the world but I guess with the appreciation for all things nature so arrived the appreciation for all things botanical. I started collecting house plants.

I guess that’s a bit of an understatement seeing how, in my living room along, I have over 50 different house plants now. Yes, 50.

Longing to get my travel legs back & wanting to use my scuba certification Evan & I booked a trip to Maui. I’m sure many of you have read about the Maui trip as those three blogs are still the most viewed on my page to this day, almost seven months later, but to put it lightly, the trip was everything. Maui felt like coming home. I mean that in the energetic sense as I cannot lay any claim to Hawaii being 0% pacific islander myself. Maui charged & invigorated my soul, it made me excited for life in a way that I hadn’t been in a long time. Our trip was jam packed, our own doing, but I wouldn’t have had it any other way. If you care to read more on that of course here are the Maui blogs; Part One, Two, & Three.

After Maui we spent the summer in & out of Kansas. We went on a family vacation to Table Rock Lake for a long weekend, I chipped my tooth tubing, & got to spend time with parts of my family I don’t often get to see. Upon returning home from family vacation Evan & I were stricken with COVID, having been fully vaccinated though the effects were minimal. I was achy with a cough for about a week & lost my sense of taste & smell for a total of three days.

About the same time I got COVID I found a crack in the sump of my 125 gallon saltwater fish tank. I had been wanting to upgrade the size of my tank for a long while & seeing how I needed to completely drain the top tank to get the bottom sump tank even out, it seemed like the perfect opportunity. This reinvigorated my love for aquarium keeping, a hobby I’ve had since I was 16. I upgraded to a 185 with a 15-20 gallon sump in the base & my tank continues to flourish & be a great source of joy & relaxation for me.

In August I began to play again, something I’d seen advised for creatives, it helps to feed that inner child we all still have. I began building legos again, a hobby I grew up loving, I tried to be more playful, to have fun in the mundane day to day experiences! I began painting my nails regularly, I got my ears pierced, why? Cuz I felt like it! I highly recommend it to all, but play responsibly & respectfully!

I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention the two songs I tracked this year, both of which I love dearly! Music has always been a way of connection for me, a form of expression & entertainment that I have made my life’s calling & creating new music is life giving to me, I can’t wait to share what I’ve been working on in 2022!

After August came Puerto Rico, a bit of a spur of the moment trip if I’m being honest. Puerto Rico is as the name suggests a rich port. It’s rich in culture, atmosphere, heritage, & adventure. I got to dive more in Puerto Rico in addition for further flexing my “foodie” tongue. You can read about that adventure in my Puerto Rico blog! Part One. Part Two.

We finally got to go back to Los Angeles in October, I hadn’t been since March of 2020 & normally it eats up about a quarter of my year! We went to Disney, I built a frickin’ lightsaber! I got to see a lot of old friends, went to a few Halloween parties, made some new friends, wrote a lot of new music, etc. Read more here.

We almost lost one of our cats, Max while in LA. Max is a three year old short haired tabby/bengal mix, who ended up getting a urinary obstruction. Our house sitter was lovely enough to sit over night with him at the emergency vet & after a few days in the hospital Max was fine. It’s incredibly difficult to have to face surgery or euthenization from the other side of the country but it really put into perspective how much I am grateful for the day to day interactions I get to have with each of my animals.

Max is the first animal to greet you at the door, the first animal to come running when the alarm goes off in the morning, in addition to being the last thing I see most nights as he kneads & purrs us all to sleep. He is an integral part of our household & I’m so blessed that he’s made a full recovery & gets to hang around this world for a long while longer.

In November I was formally diagnosed with ADD/ADHD. It was something I thought I’d had for a long while but after three months of testing I finally got verification of that. I wrote a whole blog on that process & the impact it had as well. LINK haha.

Thanksgiving was a blur, back & forth across the country seeing family members all over the states in addition to people coming into Nashville. Truly a whirlwind where at one point we’d spent two weeks traveling & only 24 hours at home in the middle of it. Lots & lots of driving.

I was also in the process of trying out different aids for my new found condition which made the Thanksgiving holiday even harder. My mother said “it was like someone had sucked out my joy.”

For once I felt a bit of the holiday spirit but with the crazy fluctuating weather that feeling fizzled out fairly quickly. I, like so many, saw Spider-Man: No Way Home opening night, the only reason for which I bring it up is because I definitely already have a blog written about that experience that may be coming out next week!

Christmas was also a whirlwind & sitting here writing about it just a week later, feels like a century ago.

Now it’s New Year’s Eve. We sit on the precipice of 2022 & I fear much like so many of us felt around the holidays this year it doesn’t exactly feel much like something worth celebrating. We once again have COVID raging across the world, we have labor shortages, & the world seems bleak but I’d advise you to look over your year & find those shining moments, the diamonds in the rough. Look back on them with fondness, with love & realize that’s what will make up the next year for you as well; small moments of human joy that bring out our appreciation for this life we’re given.

I know it’s not always easy & I know it’s hard to be hopeful when things seem such a mess but as I’ve said before, preserve. Find daily moments of gratitude & get to know yourself a little deeper.

I love you all dearly, Happy New Year & thank you ever so much for reading these. It is my true joy to connect with people & make them feel even the slightest bit more seen than they did mere minutes before coming across my words or my songs.

God Bless You All!

I wish you nothing but a prosperous & fulfilling 2022.

-C

Travel Blog: San Juan, Puerto Rico-Part One-Four Day GetAway

Hello, welcome back to another addition to my travel blog family! I know a lot of you enjoyed reading about my Maui adventures so I’m excited to share with each of you my experience in San Juan, Puerto Rico this past weekend! Unlike my Maui blog series however, this will only be in two parts. Seeing as I only have about four days worth of content to share that seems more than doable! So I guess without further ado, let’s get into it!

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PROLOGUE

I feel it’s important to outline the situation that led us to Puerto Rico in the first place. Some of you may know, others may be sad you didn’t know, but a few weeks ago Southwest Airlines was offering a three day deal where in if you booked either a round trip flight or two one way flights & used them both by November 18th, then for the entire month of January & February they would give you an unlimited companion pass to use within those two months. My entire family got in on the deal & book themselves flights. The strategy on this end was finding a flight on the cheaper side that would give us a weekend get away but also wouldn’t break the bank. We initially planned on flying to New York City for a weekend, I have many a friend that lives up there, I love the city, & hadn’t been since June of 2019. That was until we found the same priced tickets as NYC but to Puerto Rico. We went with Puerto Rico…naturally…as here you are reading a blog all about traveling to Puerto Rico…

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DAY ONE

Our flight to SJU didn’t leave Nashville until around 4:30 PM, we had a lay over in Fort Lauderdale that didn’t require us to deplane & then we were off to San Juan. At least that was the initial plan. Upon arrival at Fort Lauderdale, having attained all of the new passengers we needed for the next leg of our trip we were all forced to disembark the airplane due to a malfunction of the plane’s air conditioning unit. I didn’t really think it was that big of a deal until Evan reminded me that the AC unit on an airplane is also a part of the system used to filter out the air. We are still in a pandemic after all. We ended up sitting at a completely different gate in FL for around an hour & a half before they found us a new plane & we began to re-board. Man, was that a shit show. The gate agent requested that those of us board who had been on the previous flight from Nashville first which apparently to majority of the people who boarded in Fort Lauderdale, wasn’t fair. They made their feelings about the fairness of this all very well known as well, many attempting to butt into the line of Nashville folks or just outright board before us. Of course this then caused further delay.

After a two hour flight over the Carribean eased by a copy of Cruella previously downloaded from Disney+, we landed in San Juan. The island is requiring proof of vaccination for entry, which we uploaded before hand & were given a QR code to use after baggage claim. Right across from the terminal we picked up our rental car, a mid-sized SUV. We planned to go up into the rainforest & such. Key word; planned, we’ll get to that in the next blog. The rental agency let us pick any mid-sized SUV we wanted on the lot for the same price so naturally we picked the nicest one they had.

About two days prior to our trip the Government of Puerto Rico installed a midnight curfew. It meant from the hours of 12 AM to 5 AM nothing could be open with the exception of all night services & to-go food options, cuz, you know, you can’t catch or transmit CoVid after midnight… We hadn’t arrived in San Juan until about 11:15 local time & by the time we got the rental & were headed towards our hotel in Old San Juan, it was rapidly approaching midnight.

We drove straight to our hotel, Evan searching for open food places on his phone the entire time with no luck. The roads of Old San Juan are narrow, they’re also paved in cobblestone & are often steep at times. Driving on them feels a little like horseback riding in the mountains. Our hotel, Hotel El Convento, luckily was one of the few places en Viejo San Juan to have parking. It was valet across the street at the Catedral Basilica de San Juan Bautista but I guess in spite of the convents change in usage, it still held ties to the catholic church.

As I hinted at in the above paragraph, the Hotel El Convento is a boutique hotel built inside a former convent. Thought the nuns have long since self, the sanctity & beauty of the space still remains. It is a five story, one square block building wrapped around a courtyard that also serves as a bar/restaurant. Each room features a Juliet style balcony & maintains much of the original Spanish style charm.

Upon arrival we asked the front desk attendant where to get food seeing as it was now the midnight hour. He basically told us we were S.O.L. unless we wanted to get our car out of valet & drive to a gas station. We also were in desperate need of water. (Post Maria you’re not supposed to drink from the tap in PR. Urban places are apparently safer than others though.) Still wide awake & starving, we dropped our bags in the room & went out to explore.

The hotel attendant wasn’t wrong, everything was closed. That is, except a little bar that was still teeming with life. We entered hesitant, yet hopeful. I asked the bartended with my fingers crossed whether or not they were serving food AND THEY WERE!!!!!! SUCCESS!!! VICTORY!!!! They didn’t have bottles of water though so we ordered the next best thing, beer. In addition to the two beers we got buffalo wings & truffle fries. The bar was alive with patrons, mostly locals, who were dancing, singing along to the “Best of Frank Sinatra” album playing & generally disregarding the quarantine. As lovely as the bar was I’m not going to divulge the name, I ain’t no snitch.

With full bellies & continued dehydration we returned to the hotel room where we bunkered down for a short night of sleep.

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DAY TWO

We woke up around 6:45 AM despite having only gone to bed about four hours prior. Parched at this point we pulled the car out of valet & made our way to the nearest gas station where we stocked up on the largest bottles of water we could find & a Celsius or two. By the way, the Fruity Cereal Kit-Kats smack. #BreakfastOfChampions

I had booked a dive through a local dive shop called Scuba Dogs. They do many dives around the island but one of the ones not too far from Viejo San Juan was in what used to be the world’s largest natural swimming pool, Escambrón Marine Park. During the 30s & 40s the marine park was part of a socialite beach club attached to the long abandoned Normandie Hotel. The marine park, or pool, was created when a giant concrete walkway was installed around the perimeter. The wall underneath the walkway featured slates that allowed fish to enter & exit the bay at their leisure, but kept the “sea monsters” at bay…no pun intended. Since the demise of the Normandie Hotel the marine park was converted into a nature sanctuary. The seawall was demolished & now the bay & the surrounding areas play host to many species of marine life, large & small.

My dive was with a local dive master named Paco. I had booked two dives around the park with him that started at 8 AM & after brief introductions & dive planning we set out. Our first dive was out past the edge of the bay in the surrounding reef. One of the other dive masters in the area often brings stale bread for the fish so they’ve now picked up the habit of approaching all divers with the hope of a free meal. We spent majority of the dive surrounded by a school of hungry fish made up of Yellowtail Snapper, Blue Atlantic Tang, & Sergeant Majors. At a certain point a small group of Jack joined. I was advised at this point to tuck my hands because anything outlying that they see extending from your palms, including your fingers, they perceive as food. On our way back into the bay we found a few Trunkfish, Clown Wrasse, & two massive French Angels!

The dives themselves weren’t very deep, I think we maxed out around 30 feet, but that made the consumption of oxygen move much slower. Our second dive, which was inside the bay & around the destroyed wall, was around an hour, our first, around 50 minutes. During the second dive we went around checking the fish houses & taino reefs they’d placed around the inside of the park. I must have encroached upon the territory of an Ocean Triggerfish because they were not happy with me. Upon entering the first of the fish houses, while looking for Arrow Crabs, I felt a little nip on my arm through the wetsuit. I turned around to find a flared out triggerfish darting all around me, trying to nip at anything it could get at on me. It didn’t stop this display even when we’d left the shelter & chased us to the next one finally relenting after we got out of eye shot of it.

Further around the bay we found several Trumpetfish, a Scorpionfish, a couple of Grey Angelfish, a Sea Turtle, & even a Caribbean Reef Octopus! Paco uses his guided dives as an excuse for nature conservation, which I happily joined in on picking up any bottles or scrap we found along the way.

Post dive we met the above pictured iguana, but at this point I was absolutely starving. Evan has spent his morning snorkeling & swimming in the bay so he too was feeling the effects of hunger. Never one to skimp on my food research when it comes to travel, I had already found several options for lunch but we both agreed we were feeling local seafood. I had found a restaurant about fifteen minutes down the road called Que PezCa’o. Tucked in the bay by the maritime police depot, Que PezCa’o is surrounded on all sides by the boats of local fishermen. An outdoor eating situation in it of itself, it appeared to be a local favorite. We ordered Fried Grouper Strips, a Ceviche Mofongo, & a Taco Trio (two Ceviche, one Snapper, they were out of Octopus.) The food was incredible! Truly some of the best ceviche I’ve ever had!

After lunch we were feeling a tad sleepy & I, as usually, had a hankering for something sweet. We made our way into San Juan to Kasalta, a local cafe! Here we order two Guayaba y Queso Pastelillos, a Flan con Cinco Leches, & two Café con Hielo which we took back to the hotel & ate poolside on the fifth floor overlooking the bay & all of Viejo San Juan.

After pastelillos on the rooftop we decided to check out some of the bars near by. We found one that came highly recommended called La Factoria. During the day this craft cocktail bar only has their front bar open but on weekends the back two rooms serve as a dance space. I ordered a Peligroso (Barrilito Rum, Averna, Campari, Dry Spice Infusion, & Lime) & Evan ordered a Lavender Mule (Ketel One, Ginger Tea, Lavender, & Citrus.) Both were delicious & we sipped them sitting in an open window watching the old town walk go by.

After drinks we went back to the hotel for a bit where, after a while, we changed into clothing we could get wet in. We pulled the car out of valet & began our hour & a half drive over to Fajardo on the east coast of the island.

Why venture to Fajardo you ask? We’d booked a tour! Well, kind of a tour. We had booked a kayaking trip through the waters of the bioluminescent bay! By the time we got there it was dark, we arranged ourselves within our tour group & were given a safety briefing before being escorted to our kayaks. The kayaks were all linked together in the middle of a shallow bay, you had to wade out a bit to get them. Once we were in our kayaks, which had glow rings on either end of them, we were instructed to paddle single file up a channel through a mangrove forest. The forest waterway was pitch black but the moon was nearly full & illuminated the bare spots of water fairly well. All around us the “coqui” frogs were calling back & forth & the further we got up the channel the more the water began to sparkle.

The bioluminescence was different from the pictures I’d seen in the past; less solid washes of light & more like sparks flying off of whatever gave them kinetic energy. When we reached the lagoon at the end of the channel we bunched up into a group & passed around a tarp to block out the light. Once the light was properly blocked we were instructed to splash around in the water. It’s truly a magical experience even just going for the late night kayak ride. By the way, our tour company was called Eco Adventures!

Once we’d paddled back up the channel & had dried off the search for food began all over again. By the time we’d finished the tour completely it was 10:45 & we still had to make it all the way back to San Juan. We stopped several places along the way hoping to find food but all of them were closed. We finally ended up at a 24/7 grocery store by the San Juan Airport where we grabbed a bunch of pre-made sandwiches & sushi for dinner.

We went to bed that night exhausted but having had a blast of a day!

END OF PART ONE

Travel Blog: Maui-Part Three-Food For Thought

Previously On

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PART ONE

PART TWO

Now, back to our regularly scheduled content!

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SECTION TWO: MAUI CONTINUED

DAY FIVE

In case you were unaware, Maui is home to a very popular local restaurant, Mama’s Fish House, which is located on the north shore in Paia. I have very fond memories of going to Mama’s as a twelve year old lad & was understandably invested in going back this trip. However, COVID regulations being what they are in the state of Hawai’i at that moment, Mama’s wasn’t taking any walk-ins & their reservation list was booked out until August. I had called a few days prior to Sunday to see if there were any random cancellations but had, until that point, no luck. I was advised by the receptionist to try & call or “walk-in’ right as the restaurant opened at 11 for their lunch seating.

Sunday rolls around, Evan & I pack up the car with all the things we figured we’d need throughout our day & we headed up Paia. We arrived at the gate of Mama’s around 10:40 & pulled into a spot. Within a few minutes a line of cars had already began to form behind us. I made the call a few minutes before 11 to see if by any miraculous chance something had opened up & BAM!!! SUPERPOWER STRIKES AGAIN!!!! They had a table available at 11:20. Feeling rather hungover from the previous evening & needing to burn some time, we went back down the street to Choice Health Bar where I grabbed a Tropical Beets pressed juice & a Noni shot, a local ‘cure all” that I will definitely agree with them, is an acquired taste.

Juiced up & nearing the time of our newly minted reservation we headed back to Mama’s, immediately found a parking spot up front (superpower), & were shown down to the lower host stand. After around five minutes staring at the collection of autographed photos they have by the restaurants entrance we were shown to our table.

The vibe of the fish house was exactly as I remember it; deep Koa accents with open breezeways set nestled in the side of a hill, bay front, just off a grove of palm trees. We sat, order a little bit of the hair of the dog, & enjoyed the warm sea breeze sweeping through the venue.

At the recommendation of the waitress we ordered the Macadamia Nut Crab Cakes & the Toko (Hawaiian Octopus) for an appetizer. The crab cakes were up there as some of the best I’ve ever had, as was the octopus! For our main course we split the Mama’s Curry & their daily special of Mahi Mahi. We’d had three separate people in the restaurant rave about the curry & boy, were they right! The fish was so fresh & so perfectly prepared, it practically melted in your mouth. Dessert was espresso & a Polynesian Black Pearl, Mama’s signature dessert. The black pearl is a Passionfruit Mousse topped with Chocolate Ganache with a Cookie Shell & Passionfruit Drizzle! I’d had it before & I had never forgotten just how incredible it is!

We wrapped up at Mama’s around 12:30/1 & were absolutely stuffed, the problem with that being that we had another dinner reservation at Merriman’s at 4:30. While doing my initial restaurant research for Maui I’d stumbled upon Merriman’s & had managed to snag their very last reservation for the foreseeable future. Say it with me folks, superpower. So hoping to burn through a few calories, aid the digestion process, & having just made it through the 24 hours elevation limit following my dives, we went up to ‘Iao Valley to hike!

We were under the impression ‘Iao was a longer hike than it was but it was stunning nevertheless. The drive up to ‘Iao was very reminiscent of the Road to Hana in the sense that you go from one ecological biome to another in almost the blink of an eye. You go from Hawaiian hill country to lush rainforest. It was raining up in ‘Iao but we didn’t mind. In all honesty we were pretty hot & sweating from sitting down at Mama’s. We basically did the hike in 15 minutes then spent the next 45-ish just wandering around the park, going down to the river, contemplating swimming, trailblazing, etc.

Having a little extra time between our hike our & early dinner we decided to go back & change as we’d gotten a little muddier than we’d initially anticipated. We cleaned off & got back in nicer clothes before we climbed back into the car & went up Lahaina way.

Dinner at Merriman’s was set right on the edge of a cliff overlooking the north shore to the backdrop of a wedding happening just below us. It was served grand prix style so we got to pick from a few options in each category; appetizer, entree, dessert (naturally). Evan & I once again split everything we ordered getting Ahi Poke & once again, Octopus. Evan favored Merriman’s octopus, I think I favored the Mama’s one, both were exceptional though. Our entrees were Shrimp & Scallops as well as a Macadamia Nut encrusted Mahi Mahi. Dessert was Passionfruit Pot De Creme & a Flourless Chocolate Cake. I wish we’d gone into dinner a little more hungry but I don’t think either of us regret getting to do both restaurants even if they were bumped a little close time wise to one another.

We went back to Kihei & ended up once again sat at the bar at Nalu’s before calling it an early evening. I had a dive that departed from Lahaina at 6:45 AM the next day & we were going to need to leave our condo around 5:45/6 to get there.

END DAY FIVE

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DAY SIX

As I stated above, Monday started with an early morning. We left the VRBO at between 5:45/6 AM & went back up the coast to Lahaina. My check-in at Lahaina Divers was at 6:45 at their shop. I checked-in, grabbed a wetsuit, collected the rest of my gear & walked through old town Lahaina from the shop to the harbor. Aboard the ship I was shown to my BCD & tanks for the dive before we did one last check & headed off to Lanai. Evan went on his way to explore Lahaina, landing somewhere with a chocolate croissant on a beach.

The dive Monday was to the Cathedrals of Lanai, a series of lava tubes off the southern coast of the island of Lanai. Our first dive spot was Cathedral One, a lava tube with a large stone in the middle they refer to as “the alter.” I was paired with a dude from Colorado but the total population of our dive group was 8-10 people. I think I decided at this early point in my dive experience that it might just be worth it to pay the extra bit of cash to have a private dive guide or at least to get a smaller dive group. The amount of times I got kicked in the face, run into, etc was alarmingly high. That’s not to say I didn’t have fun, I had a blast, truly. It was just a lesson learned at 40 feet below the surface.

At the first cathedral we swam upon a series of rare crabs, several sharks lounging in a cave, & a massive porcupine puffer, not to mention the breathtaking, pun intended, cathedral itself. We exhausted our tanks, returned to the boat, & went off to our second dive location.

Our second tank of the trip was reserved for Sergeant Major, a dive they can only do when the current conditions are right. The site is named as such due to the large quantities of Sergeant Majors, a striped yellow & grey damselfish, that school there. The main draw to Sergeant Major’s lava fingers however is the presence of the Javanese Eel. A Javanese Eel, otherwise known as the Giant Moray, is just that. Giant. They can reach up to three meters in length & weigh up to sixty-six pounds. Did we find the eel? We sure did. Was it magnificent? It definitely was!

At Sergeant Major I felt the pressure of the close quarters especially when it came to getting the whole group to see the fauna of interest. In one such occasion I did my best to get out of the way of a less than observant fellow diver & ended up with a three inch gash across my thigh from a run in with a stony coral.

I don’t mean to sound down trodden on the dive, it was a blast & truly an amazing experience. I honestly can’t wait to dive the cathedrals again & my dive guide was awesome! I’ll just definitely be doing so in a smaller group.

After our dive was finished we all boarded the boat & headed back to Lahaina. Evan met me at the dive shop where I picked up a t-shirt & a sticker then we headed down the coast towards Leoda’s to get a post dive pie or two.

At Leoda’s we got one of their Famous Banana Cream Pies & a Pineapple Macadamia Nut Pie. As much as a banana cream pie fan as I am, I think the pineapple one was my favorite! In addition to the pies we went to the small local convenience shop next door & grabbed a few pieces of Spam Musabi.

Once we’d returned to Kihei I went down for a nap after feeling sapped from the morning. Pretty sure we returned to Nalu’s yet again that night. We’d made friends with the bartender/manager, Sue, & were going there to hang out with her & exchange stories.

END DAY SIX

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DAY SEVEN

Our last day in Maui.

Our flight out wasn’t until around midnight & I’d asked our lovely VRBO host for an extension on our checkout time since we had nowhere to go until then. She graciously gave us the entirety of the day!

We slept in a tad as we knew the day & night ahead of us was going to be a long one, especially with that red eye flight out. After waking up a bit later than usual we set out to grab one last snorkel before we had to say goodbye to Hawai’i. We ventured down to Wailea to Makena Landing & got to snorkeling amongst the divers. Was I fairly jealous of the fact they could stay down while I had to come up for air constantly, yes, but I enjoyed myself nonetheless even seeing two separate turtles & almost running into one!

After our morning swim we headed back to start cleaning the apartment we’d called home for the past week. Since our host had extended our time for free we decided to make it as easy as possible on her & cleaned majority of the place ourself, including laundry. Once we were satisfied, we packed our stuff into the car & headed off to get one last shave ice from Ululani’s.

I got the same flavor as before, the guava, mango, passionfruit mix with macadamia nut ice cream but instead of a second POG I got a Thai Tea with Sweetened Condensed Milk on it! Shaved ice in hand we went down the road to return Evan’s snorkel gear & bid the Maui Dive team one last fond farewell.

We’d been invited by Sue to come sit at Nalu’s with our bags until it was time to catch the shuttle from the rental service to the airport. So that’s exactly what we did! I wasn’t mad about that decision at all, especially since I wanted to grab one last bowl of poke before we left. Sat at the bar of Nalu’s we met a couple from Fort Collins who were on the last leg of their trip too. We sat exchanging drinks & stories until I received an urgent call from the shuttle service saying they needed us to get on the earlier shuttle to the airport. I honestly didn’t know it was an option but the driver disclosed that we could also just drop the car at the parking lot across from the terminal & they would come pick it up in the morning. We opted for that option & sat at the bar for another hour or so.

After many a hug & sad goodbye we drove to the airport dropping the car exactly where the rental company had asked. The airport looked like a ghost town, especially compared to the week before. We breezed through the livestock/produce check, check-in, & security & made it to our gate with an hour to spare.

END DAY SEVEN

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END SECTION TWO: MAUI

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SECTION THREE: KANSAS TO NASHVILLE

We’d received a comp upgrade on our seats & were each put in the exit row. I guess no one else thought to try & do the same because the exit row, on both sides, was completely empty. So, we took advantage of that! I took the left side of the plane, Evan the right, & we had our very own economy class lay flat beds!

Getting surprisingly more rest than expected & landing in Phoenix, we got to our gate & took an additional nap followed by another nap on the flight from Phoenix to Kansas City. We picked up dinner on the way back to my parents & met my sister & her family there for dinner.

The next morning, before heading back to Nashville we met my sister & niece at Snooze AM Eatery for breakfast before swinging back by my parents, picking up the dogs, & heading back home to Nashville.

END SECTION THREE

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END BLOG

EPILOGUE

I hope you enjoyed my stories, I hope I was able to capture even the slightest bit of majesty & magic that Maui has to offer & transport you there for even the briefest moment in time. Maui is an other worldly place full of immense beauty, personality, love, & culture. It is a place all its own & if you let it, it’ll readily make you feel welcomed & right at home. Much like any place I travel I have found that the people are truly what makes them special. This world is a colorful tapestry of life experience, trials & tribulations, & all of us are searching for the same things, identity & home.

Maui was already a special place in my heart but now it has cemented itself there. I’ve found myself over the last few weeks having a very hard time leaving it behind not to mention how much its sabotaged my sleep schedule. I urge anyone to find a way to Hawai’i but if you go, do so with respect. These islands are someone else’s lands, someone else’s home, someone else’s traditions & they are worth celebrating. Treat the land with respect, treat the people with respect, & do your best to leave it as you found it for those who come after. Yes, Hawai’i is beaches & ocean but it is so, so, so much more than that. It is a thriving culture & community that deserved to be preserved & passed down from generation to generation. Mahalo Maui for an unforgettable week. I’m grateful for the lessons you taught me, the friends I made, & the amazing opportunities you laid in my path. I can’t wait to see you again & I truly hope it is sooner rather than later.

-C