A little nostalgia here! In the navigation, there’s a new link to a very old blog of mine called “Go Left at the Mango Tree.” It’s a trip I did with a friend to Belize in 2000, when I fell in love with the country. I even rented a little place and was planning to go back to live there. 78 Front St, PG Town. I wonder if it’s still there. It was so ramshackle but right on the water. And so lopsided an orange rolled downhill from one corner to the other with no help from me.
But once I got back to the States, life got in the way and I didn’t move south.
Reading through what I had written it reminded me how technology has changed our world. I remember sitting on the dilapidated steps of one the places we stayed, typing into a word.doc and then finding an internet cafe to upload the text to the blog, which took forever. And photos… that was three cups of coffee, waiting! Of course, the text was saved onto a disk and then slipped into the public computer. Virus? What virus? WiFi? Huh?
Just looking at the format of the blog makes me smile :) It’s so clunky and dated but such good memories. It was such a memorable trip and so much fun. Reading through it is like living it all over again, and I wonder what my life would have been like if I had managed to stay there?
When I went back down to Belize on that wonderful boat trip in 2016, the place had the same affect on me. I fell in love all over again, even though we didn’t go to any of the places I had been before.
That early trip to Belize was probably the start of the most unsettled times in my life; from then on, it feels like I have constantly been on the move, not necessarily because I wanted to, but circumstances dictated when and where I went. I’ve lost track of how many apartments/houses/countries and states I stayed in during those years. They all blend together and often the only way I can get my timelines straight is to go through my pictures! And then it’s “Really? It’s that long ago? I don’t remember that event/place/person!”
I’m looking forward to being in one spot for a couple of months, starting on Tuesday. The plan is to get the underwear site really cranking and another one, for women, started and also producing. I’m going to try out a new ecommerce site which apparently is very good and way less expensive than Shopify. And I will hopefully get in two dog walks a day, for my health and and what I call my “panini and coffee money.”
South Park, San Diego is a long way from PG Town in Belize, but it’s a safe, comfortable place for me to be and reassess my life. And I am so grateful to Georgia for providing the safe space for me to hunker down.