the beauty of tijuana at magic hour

my brother kevin enjoying his 99 centavo corona. check out that menu board to the left.

this place ROCKS! it's tijuana! ¡tres tacos para un dólar! just a walk across the border from san diego.

finally in san diego! i went snorkelling in la jolla cove in the balmy 72F water.

it's kai-kai and colleen in flagstaff! this was my next stop after santa fe. kai-kai and tim were visiting colleen at the same time i was using a corner of her living room floor. i got to meet george, colleen's not-at-all-old fiance.

a HUGE HOLE! it's meteor crater! 50,000 years ago a meteorite 150 feet across smashed into the arizona desert creating a hole 700 feet deep and 4,000 feet across! the brochure says so!

in santa fe, i mooched off the warm hospitalities of paul and junko and kept kazuma (the boy) and cocoa (the dog) company.

sunsetting during my drive to santa fe, nm from houston, tx. this was hour 14.5.

uncle happy presides over his throne. bring on the playstation!

dan is down the road tearing it up.

they had just opened this week. buck is wearing the green scrubs and cowboy boots.

all keesler alumni

on my drive from biloxi to san diego i stopped to see some ex-air force friends in houston. this is a shop buck and happy have opened up in north houston.

will he ever leave?

Nine days to go until I leave the country. (This is my first attempt at publishing on the world-wide waste-o-time.) I will have spent one month longer in San Diego than I had planned, which means I have taken Hawaii off my list of destinations for this trip; it was to be my first destination. In the past six weeks I have managed to get back in shape by running and biking almost everyday and by not going out to eat and drink. I have also spent a lot of time getting paperwork ready for my eventual return, i.e. medical licenses and employment. A lot of time has been spent on preparing for this long trip mentally: reading other travelogues for inspiration, watching movies, looking for more equipment. It has been much too easy to sit in my parents' home, the house I grew up in, and revert to adolescence. I had foreseen this problem, but I was still unable to avoid it. What finally broke me out of this haze was the departure of my parents for Asia three weeks ago. I also spent a long time emailing a couple travel agents over the itinerary and prices. It took me forever to commit to a date of departure; finally, last week, I bought my ticket.
It has been ten years since I moved from San Diego. My observations:
It is much more crowded than I remember.
Traffic blows; the freeways begin to clog up at 3 pm on weekdays. For the past ten years, I hardly ever had to use the freeways (Hershey, York, and Biloxi).
Navigating the aisles with a shopping cart at Costco (a discount warehouse like Sam's Club) and 99 Ranch (Asian supermarket) on a weekend produces more road rage than the I-5/805 merger, which actually has improved in the past ten years.
The wonderful tacos in Tijuana are STILL three for a dollar, which means, ten years ago, I was getting ripped off!