A day in the life...Not as laid back as it may seem....

Yesterday, as it rained inside the house, Madame Zahra handed us an umbrella so we could go out to dinner. With the crowds in the souks, its not easy to walk around with an open umbrella fearful of poking a passerby in the eye. It was a trying 45 minute walk to the restaurant as we maneuvered the many puddles, all the while getting soaked from the spray from motorbikes whizzing past. It was cold, 13C, 55F. By the time we reached the restaurant, my shoes were wet and my toes were numb.

This morning, awakening at 6:00 to the loud sounds of birds flapping their wings and squawking to the heavens in the center courtyard, I was ready to jump up and look out the bedroom door, knowing they'd fly away the second I peeked out.

As soon as we entered the restaurant we cozied up to this flaming heater seeking a little warmth after the long walk through the rain soaked souks.

Reminding myself to bring my camera upstairs tonight, I'm determined to get a photo of their rambunctious mating rituals with spring in the air. The loud squawking can't possibly be pigeons which we often hear at a lower tone. If nothing else, I'll video the sounds to share here tomorrow. It's absolutely unreal!

Once inside the restaurant, closing off this door to their courtyard, we were able to warm up enough to remove our jackets while we had dinner.

Instead of getting up I grabbed my mindless dribble novel on my phone's Kindle app and lost myself in reading for the next two hours, finally bolting out of bed, almost feeling guilty for lounging so long.

Do us retired (or in my case, semi-retired) folks ever get over the feeling that there's something that "must be done now" in order to stop feeling a sense of obligation or responsibility? Isn't retirement about "retiring" from those dreadful feelings of self imposed pressure to constantly be productive?

Excuse the blur as I took this photo of a ceiling in the souk while on the move through the dense tourist crowds who were shopping in a frenzy on a Saturday. This type of roof is typical in the souks resulting in rain dripping on us as we walked with little space to open the umbrella. Many of the vendors dragged their merchandise inside their tiny shops or covered it with plastic.

In deep thought as I overlooked the drying out courtyard after days of rain, I reminded myself of a few things, applicable at this time: I don't have to clean, do laundry, take out the trash, cook or do dishes. Gee...how stress free can it get?

All of us, deep within our core are shaken from time to time with the reminder from the habits of many years of getting up and going to work, only to come home to added responsibilities. That's over now.

The colorful entrance to a mosque inside the souk.

The only responsibility I have at this moment in life is to make myself presentable for the day (now down to 20 minutes flat), keep track of our finances, and blissfully write here each and every day.

Don't get me wrong. Writing here each day is not as simple as sitting down and banging out our recent activities and thoughts. It requires careful planning, researching and constantly searching for photo ops, not always an easy task.

This is the ornate architecture above the colorful door of the mosque as shown in the previous photo.

Overall, it's no less than a six hour a day "job" that we both take seriously.
Tom, as my editor and sharing equal time in research, joins me in the incessant scanning of our environment searching for stories and photos. However, we love every moment, even when on an occasional morning, for a moment, I may think I'll skip a day...and don't...I can't...I want to do it.

Without this, we'd travel the world taking an occasional photo, writing repetitive email to family and friends, leaving memory after memory stuck only in our heads and on "camera uploads" in Dropbox.

Often when passing these bakeries with amazing looking desserts and cookies, I encourage Tom to try something so I can live vicariously through him. Alas, his picky taste buds prevent him from trying a single cookie. Good thing I have no alternative but to maintain my restrictive way of eating, sans sugar, starch and flour or I'd have gained a substantial sum of weight while here. Then, my limited clothing supply would no longer fit. I suppose for Tom, in this case his picky eating habits serve him well.

With this, we need only click back to a year ago or two to be reminded of the glorious, or otherwise, experiences we had along the way, with stories and photos, reliving it over and over again. Add the joy of knowing that thousands of readers all over the world are sharing this adventure with us, catapults us to another level of pleasure we can hardly describe.

Even the prospect of generating enough revenue from the links on our site that hopefully more and more readers will use, at the same pricing offered on the original websites, to defray it's maintenance costs and perhaps a few other related expenses, adds a level of enthusiasm that only my long ingrained entrepreneurial spirit can hardly dispel as we travel the world.

Tom refused to stop to let me ogle another sweet morsel as I shot another bakery display in passing.

Oh, would that our grandparents had left us a legacy such as this that we could wrap our brains around, knowing from whence we came, even if only to a small degree, that for us may explain the wanderlust in our hearts and the willingness to share it with others.

No, it's not always exciting and thought provoking. At times, it may even be dull and repetitive. But, for us, the joy continues as we share the mundane, the tender, the exciting and the quiet contemplative times of our lives as we move from one country to another filling our hearts and minds with the knowledge, the wonder and the constant longing, for more.
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Photo from one year ago today, March 30, 2013:

On this date last year while preparing to leave Belize, we illustrated how we scan our tax deductible receipts and safely dispose of the paper with no shredder on hand. Please click here for the link to the rest of the story.