Diving the Catalinas

Sometime in mid December I dropped off my regulator at the local dive shop for annual servicing. I had a long conversation with the person working there about my upcoming trip and specifically asked if it would be done in time. She said that yes, no problem, it would be done by the end of […]

What I Heard About Costa Rica

As we explored the seafloor at the first site of the day, Argentina, something struck me as being very different from my previous dives. The ocean isn’t silent, by any means, but there isn’t a lot of sound. This place sounded different. It sounded … like whale song: an eerie, haunting moan that resonates with […]

In Which I Didn’t Pay Much Attention

Miguel, my driver from the airport, hadn’t heard of my hotel. I looked at the reviews again, slightly worried – there weren’t as many as I remembered, and nothing recent. What had I been thinking? When I was booking this trip I had considered several resorts, but they felt constrained or out of the way. […]

Laying Over

I’ve said it before: there are a lot of moving parts when traveling in a pandemic. Costa Rica shouldn’t have been bad. They don’t require COVID testing for entry, so that was one logistical bar I didn’t have to hurdle (I did pre-trip testing anyway, and that was negative). And they don’t require an international […]

Where the Waters Once Spoke

Delphi! The navel of the world. Spiritual center of Ancient Greece. The Oracle. This is where the ancients looked for wisdom and guidance. This is one of the places the Roman Emperor Julian, from his capital in Constantinople, turned when he attempted to restore paganism to the empire during his brief reign from 361 – […]

I’m Wondering How Ancient Athletes Cheated

Every site has it’s own story and another way it grabs me and invokes my imagination. A friend once described ancient ruins as “old rocks,” but for me they are so much more than that. They are fingerprints and sweat, labor and pride, and they are memory and mirror. Messene, yesterday, was multilayered, like an […]