PTO

There’s only so much snow I can handle, and that amount diminishes with each passing year. Snow used to be fun, with the sledding and snowballs and snow this and snow that. I suppose it was around when I bought my first driveway that the pleasure began to wane. For a number of years, I even entertained the thought that just an inch, every few days, would be fine throughout the winter – just enough to whitewash the winter grime.

Now, with increasingly thin blood and the steepest driveway ever, I’ll do what it takes to minimize my exposure, including a few years in the Tropics, my winter excursion to war torn Iraq and last week’s trip to Caribbean Venezuela, where the weather back home was, quite seriously, the very least of my concerns.


Not that I had that many concerns. I had some, but not many. Cash was one, as local ATM’s were occasionally available, but not accommodating. However, I could make a wire transfer to our hotelier, who would swap my Federal Reserve Notes for black market rate Bolivars. On occasion, the Visa would work, but costs really weren’t so bad that I needed to carry huge sums of cash to get us through a day on the beach, or an evening at the ball park.

Security is always an issue. There’re places in my own metropolitan area that I won’t go into unprepared, so why would I travel to Hugo Chaves-land and not maintain a high degree of situational awareness? Venezuela is known for her high crime rate and the kidnap and murder rates there are definitely worthy of some concern. However, if you behave like a soft target, you will get targeted, so we didn’t do that. We kept to main roads, minimized our public drunkenness, took care in selected our taxis, and tried to return to the compound at a reasonable hour. Ultimately, besides a couple of unsuccessful pickpocketing attempts by others, we survived unscathed.

Language was a problem. However, when the various skills and vocabularies of four gringos were combined, we could usually order a meal (“pollo empanadas, por favor”), secure a couple of beers (“dos cervesa Solara por el camino”), hail a cab (“taxi!”), or shun some beachside higglers (“no gracias, no gracias, no gracias, no gracias, no gracias, no gracias,…”). In general, there were fewer English speakers than any of the other places I’ve traveled, which makes me again regret taking Russian in High School. At the time, no one knew who was going to win the Cold War, so I thought it prudent if I could speak the language of our potential new overlords. In retrospect, Spanish is the Lingua Franca of most of the Americas, and much handier. Next time – really – I’ll try to get some more formalized training.

But snow? Not a concern. Too much sun was the real problem – if you could call 85 degree, partly cloudy days on the beach a problem – which I most emphatically do not. Again (to get the point across), it was 85 degrees and partly cloudy,… every,… single,… day. In the translated and summarized words of our Venezuelan hosts, “you need another beer with that?”