Island Time

We didn't think it was anything unusual. We thought that being on time was something all airlines did. Either we have been very lucky with our travels or we're a bit naive, or both. Other than a delay caused by a volcano erupting, we rarely have problems with our flights. 

This flight was scheduled for 9:30 to leave Fort Lauderdale and arrive in Nassau at 10:30. We got up at 6, called an Uber at 7, arrived at the airport at 7:35. The line was long at the BahamasAir check in desk, we made it through that and security and sat down at the gate at about 8:45. That's why it's important to get to the airport early, right? 

Long lines at the Bahamas Air check-in

Jim stood in line to get us a breakfast sandwich and that took another half hour. When I looked at my watch and saw 9:10 I started to worry that Jim wouldn't make it back in time to board. No need to worry. There was no boarding call. At 9:40 we heard an announcement that the flight was delayed to 10:45. We ate our sandwiches, caught up on email and news, studied all the people waiting with us, laughed with the little kids rumbling around, even read a chapter of my book on kindle. 

It's now 11:06 and we're still sitting here with no further announcement. 

Welcome to island time. 

Ahhh, we just had an announcement. There's a mechanical issue with the plane, they will have an update in 45 minutes. We have a mandatory meeting to attend for the Toastmasters conference at 2pm. We thought we were going to have a few hours to kill, now we'll be lucky not to be late. 

Well, it is now 12:45 and the last word was to expect an update at 2pm. We will definitely miss our meeting. 

It is now 3pm and they just announced "we will let you know in 30 minutes about the status of your flight" What the hero does that mean? A couple hours ago they have is all vouchers for$15 of food.  We went across the hall and had a beer.  Couldn't use the voucher because that was for food only,  but it was a nice attitude adjustment.  The folks sitting next to us at the bar struck up a conversation and were on a shopping trip to buy an RV. We had a lot to talk about!

We've both tried to communicate with the facilitators of the meeting we were supposed to attend but no response to our emails or charts in the conference apps.

Que Sera Sera 

4:20 and we're finally seated on the plane. They never did give us any information about what work was being done on the plane. I was impressed with how calm everyone was, sitting in the waiting area for hour after hour. At the 3:00 Mark we did hear some shouting by people up around gate. So, looks like 6 hours is a normal breaking point. 

On our way! I still love air travel. I enjoy the window seat and trying to identify places we fly over. This is Bimini - we go diving there regularly.

Passport Panic

 Our passports are not due to expire until August, 2024, so why did we turn them in for renewal in May 2023? A couple of reasons

1. A friend of ours - Cary Tennis, was at the Miami airport ready to board his plane to France and they turned him away because his passport was expiring within 90 days of travel! I did not know this rule. We have travel planned for 2024 - not within 90 days of August, but pretty close. See his story about the ordeal at Marooned in Miami. 
2. We've been hearing news that passport renewals are taking a long time. 10-13 weeks standard, and some stories of up to 6 months. 

We studied the calendar - we had international travel planned for October 2023 and April 2024 - and decided the safest time to submit the passports for renewal was - NOW - that was in May. The online passport renewal process apparently was down for renovations so we had to fill out real paperwork and send in our old passports by mail. I don't like being without a passport! We generally plan travels 6-10 months out, but there's nothing I enjoy more than taking advantage of spur-of-the-moment opportunities. Without a passport - that's impossible. 

In June, Jim accepted another year as president of our Toastmasters club, and I took on the role of VP of Education. This made us take a look at the Toastmasters International Convention scheduled for August 16 in the Bahamas. Toastmasters is a cool thing - we've been going to local club meetings and practicing our public speaking for over 20 years. We even visit Toastmasters clubs as we travel, in New Jersey, Arizona, and even Brisbane Australia. This year, the International Convention is in our District, and therefore we are part of the hosting. They were looking for volunteers to help run the convention. We decided to go - hey we can do a little scuba diving there as well! The prospect of doing something completely different - being part of a group of workers at a convention - has me really excited. I love meeting new people, and the people who are part of Toastmasters are interesting people. They're there because they want to improve themselves and learn and teach! My kind of people.  

Uh-Oh - we don't have passports! Well, passports aren't actually required for the Bahamas right? I remember going there may years ago and just showing a drivers license. 

Wrong. Passports are definitely required now - regardless of your mode of transportation. 

Well - our renewals were acknowledged received on May 30, we'll need them on August 15 - that's 11 weeks. I'll bet they'll be here in plenty of time. That 10-13 weeks is just outside estimates, right? 

We checked on paying for expedited service, but you're supposed to do that when you first apply. Now they say, if your date of travel is within 2 weeks - call the Passport office and you can get an appointment to visit the office (in Miami) and they'll manually finish the renewal process and you'll get your passport in a few days. So, we called on August 1 - they said, oh no, no, no - Aug 1 to Aug 15 is not within 2 weeks, call us back tomorrow. Geez. 

We called back on Aug 2 and asked to get an appointment in Miami. They said, no can do, you now need to be within 5 days of travel in order to get an appointment! Yikes - I don't think our blood pressure can take that kind of time frame. Can we pay for expedited service? She said, sure but it won't help - expedited service takes 27 days. 

What can you do? She said that she can send in a note on our file for "urgent travel." OK, please do so. She said, OK, but we did not receive any notification that our passport status had changed and no one contacted us to confirm that we had actual travel plans within 2 weeks. We were losing hope. Can we really wait till 5 days before to know if we can go or not? We started looking at cancellation policies on the flights, hotel, diving, and conference fees. Not good. Well, this may be giving me the opportunity to test if our Chase credit card really does give us trip insurance just by paying with the card. (nope - they have an exception. If you have to cancel travel due to not having the required documents - that's on you. No insurance coverage for that.)

I started planning other things for those 8 days. We kept checking our passport status, not really expecting to see any change. The backlog of passport renewals even made national news programs. Families who had planned their trip-of-a-lifetime were unable to go due to lack of passport. Sigh.

We kept checking the passport status hourly, it kept saying "In Process." We went on with our lives. I went to an appointment. When I came home, Jim said - come take a look:

I'll be damned. Something did happen! We screamed and did happy dances. We were SO SURPRISED. Well, as Jim says - they're not in our hands yet.

I'll let you know.

8/9/23 

Happy Dance!! Jim's passport was in our mailbox on Monday Aug 7. Mine took a more nuanced route to get here. I watched the tracking screen while my passport was logged in at Opa Locka (several cities south of us), then Hollywood (one city south of us) then back to Opa Locka, and finally Fort Lauderdale. Mine reached us on Wednesday Aug 9. 

Here we come Bahamas! for the International Toastmasters convention ... and a couple days of diving. 

Soccer? Really?

I knew next to nothing about soccer, but we happened to catch the soccer world cup last year when we were on our Caribbean cruise because it was playing, live, on every big screen. We saw Argentina win with the hero Messi. Also, we follow some YouTubers named Snow and Curt. They happened to be in Buenos Aires when the final game was played and they showed the city's celebration: 5 million sing and dance in the streets of Buenos Aires. When we heard that Messi joined the Miami team, we understood why it was so exciting. Then, tonight we hear that the first game where Messi will play is right here at the DRV PNK stadium. It's just a couple of miles from our house. It used to be Lockhart Stadium, the place where my high school played football games and I marched on the field as part of the drill team. 

1970 - Lockhart Stadium where my high school played footbal. Photo shows the Titanaires drill team on the field. Notice how the stands end and it is just opened to the surrounding parking lot. Not even any stands in the end zone. I doubt that it had seating for even 2,000.

Here's what it looks like now. It seats 21,000. It was reconstructed in 2019 when David Beckham wanted his Miami team to play there.

When w heard that Mesi would be playing here,  And a local brewery was promoting it,  we decided to make a night of it and visit the prison pals brewery.  We sat at the bar and chatted with the women next to us. They were consulting their phones, learned that tickets at the stadium had come down to $70  so they bought 3 and called an uber to take off.  The uber arrived so fast that they needed to chug their beers.

Their seats were immediately filled with two young men.  I made conversation with them too. I just mention what a boring game this is ... 1 hour in and the score was 0 to 0! Just as I said that a cheer went up in the room Miami scored! Messi was not playing yet. We finished watching the game on TV at home where Messi made the game-winning goal. I'll bet we could hear the cheer from the stands at our house if we had gone outside. What an event. I may become a soccer fan yet. Since I like world travel - I like that this game is truly worldwide.

Starting a new Podcast

 What's a podcast? Well, the term has changed over the years. Apple made the iPod in the early 2000's. It's main purpose was to play your music collection. The device advertised that you could have 1,000 songs in your pocket. Then people came up with the idea of recording people talking, like radio talk shows and recording them like 'songs.' "Podcasts" was born.

Fast forward to the YouTube era and podcasts could also be video. We started doing our live YouTube show "What Does This Button Do?" in 2014. Now, 9 years later, we have 260 episodes and YouTube suggested that we use their new classification of Podcast for it. On our YouTube channel, you'll see a menu item for Podcast and the only thing there is our Button show.

We're doing pretty well with our Youtube channel - just passed 10,000 subscribers! And, we're actually earning a few hundred dollars a month. It's got our attention. We won a review on YouTube Channel Reviews and they had lots to say - some good, and lots of suggestions for improvement. We took it to heart and made lots of changes - like the new banner art. It's really fun to have this outlet for our creativity and learning.

Meanwhile, we also told Tech for Seniors that they need a photo segment in their show and I'd be happy to do it. They said yes. We needed to come up with a name for it, I wanted it to be catchy, but friendly and I turned to my trusted sidekick - ChatGPT, Bard etc. to come up with something. Instead of asking it for a title for a segment of another show, I decided the best word to use to describe what I wanted was a title for a "podcast." We weren't really doing a podcast, but it's kind of like a podcast? It was a regular segment on a particular topic delivered every other week. As we continued tweaking a title, I decided I kinda liked the idea of making a podcast! We have one podcast listed on our YouTube channel, why not 2?

So, we produce the 10 minute video for Tech for Senior, they use it on their Monday show, then we can repurpose it and post it on our YouTube channel maybe a week later and call it a podcast.

Fun with Photos

A Podcast from Geeks on Tour. 10 minute episodes answering your questions about taking, making, keeping, and sharing your lifetime of photos.

1. How can I fix my dark photos?
2. What is the best way to take Fireworks photos?

Those are the 2 we've done so far, we're waiting for a third before we create the podcast. My 3d topic is scanning old photos. I figure I'll show just snapping photos of old photos, using my phone, using Google's PhotoScan app, and maybe a minute on that cool Photomyne app that can capture a whole page of an old photo album at once. Lo and Behold, I look at Google Photos where it links out to PhotoScan and there's Photomyne as well. COOL! My main objection to photomyne in the past was tht it was dificult to get the results into Google Photos. Now, it's automatic! I will definitely use that! And, I never would have known about it if I hadn't taken it upon myself to do more teaching!

I Love my work!

I Love my life?

Happy 4th, and 25th

 We got married 25 years ago today, July 4. We picked the day because it would be easy to remember and there would always be fireworks for us. 

To celebrate this year, we booked a room at the same hotel where we spent our wedding night all those years ago. What a perfectly gorgeous view of the beach and the ocean we had!

It was hot, but beautiful, weather. No rain. They had a bottle of champagne and 2 glasses waiting in our room. We booked 2 nights so we could get there the night before and spend the whole day and night of the 4th just enjoying life!

We even got wet!

That sunscreen is a bit too white, isn't it? 

We walked down strip and had dinner at Bubba Gump Shrimp Co. It was great. And, so fun. That sign you see on the table, "Run Forrest Run" - if you turn it over it says, "Stop Forrest Stop" - and that 's the signal that you want your server to get you something!

For Dessert, we got a box of chocolates!

Sunrise and Moonrise were just exquisite.

And the fireworks did not disappoint. The best part was we had the best view right from our room.

25 years, plus 5 more before we actually got married, and I don't see how we could be much happier. We both have the same mission - to make the other one happy while completely enjoying ourselves as well. We're so lucky that we enjoy the same things. And, where there is potential for conflict we separate our activities just enough. For example, for our YouTube shows, I create the content - and Jim doesn't second-guess anything I do there. He handles all the production, and I don't even know how he does it, so I never bother him with back-seat driving there. 

And, we both know that life is for having fun. We have fun with our work, but even so, it is important to have a break - thus the 2 nights at a hotel. 

So, what did I do? I brought my Google Photos book along and went thru it getting inspired to work on an update. Like I said, that's fun.

Our July 4, anniversary dinner was outdoors, right on the beach, at the Marriott Harbor beach hotel, right next door to ours. We walked along the beach to get there. It was delightful, delicious, and memorable.