Hasta Luego, Texas! Hola, Costa Rica!

All together now: Welcome home, Kat and Layne!

Muchas gracias, estimados lectores! (Thank you very much, dear readers.) It is indeed good to be back in Costa Rica. Despite this being the height of the rainy season, the sun is shining for us today as if in greeting. The palm fronds are waving hello and the cattle across the valley are faintly lowing, welcoming us back to our little Santa Eulalia paradise.

This year has found us out of Costa Rica almost as much as we've been in the country. First, there was the three-and-a-half month sojourn to our old home in Northern California to make repairs, renovations and refinance; then, almost as soon as we returned to Costa Rica I learned that my mom in Texas was sick and needed my help. So off I went for a five-week trip to nurse her back to health and help with projects around her house. Layne joined me for the last two weeks and we returned just last night.

Darrelynn, Tom and Yours Truly

Although most of the trip was devoted to caring for my mom, there was still time for a short weekend trip to visit old friends outside of Austin and San Antonio. My dear friend Darrelynn from high school has recently married a delightful gentleman named Tom and the two of them now live in his lovely home overlooking Horseshoe Bay, filled to overflowing with collectibles, artwork, unusual knickknacks and other beautiful furnishings. Layne and I spent a pleasant afternoon with them talking over old times and learning about Tom's fascinating career fighting fires in Kuwait and elsewhere alongside the likes of Red Adair, the legendary Texas oil well firefighter.

Philisse, Anastasia & Agatha
(Aurora was taking her "beauty sleep")

Philisse and Layne at the Blue Star

After a drive down to San Antonio we met the next morning with Philisse, an old San Francisco friend who has transplanted to Texas to be near her daughter Agatha and granddaughters Anastasia and Aurora. Layne and I have known Agatha since she was scarcely a year old, so seeing her with her young family is truly a joy. 

Soon with Philisse and Layne in the "pilot car" and me trailing in our rental car, the three of us took off for brunch at the Blue Star Brewing Company Restaurant, located next to the meandering San Antonio River, a trip through freeway traffic that turned into a major expedition with lengthy detours off Interstate 10 as we made our way to the Brewing Company. Ironically, we later learned an overturned beer truck was to blame for our delay!

A young caballero

My stay in Texas overlapped with Costa Rica's Independence Day on September 15th, a date celebrated along with other Central American countries for their joint declaration of freedom from Spain in 1821. With San Angelo's large Latino community, there were plenty of celebrations to attend, from the dances and food fair at the Paseo de Santa Angela to a horseback riding and roping demonstration by Mexican caballeros on the big parade grounds of Fort Concho. Although only a small crowd was in attendance, the efforts by the riders and their horses were well appreciated, particularly those of the smallest young cowboy and his pony.

Fort Concho itself is an interesting attraction in this West Texas town, a national historic landmark noted as the best-preserved 1880's fort in the United States, with most of the former U.S. Army post and some twenty-three original or restored fort structures still standing. (See my blog post on Fort Concho history here.)

In her younger days my mom was an active volunteer at the Fort, working in archive preservation and serving as an informed docent. She still spends many a Sunday afternoon greeting visitors in Officer's Quarters #1 and sharing her vast knowledge of the Fort's history, legends and ghost stories. One of the most entertaining and nostalgic evenings Mother, Layne and I spent while we were there was watching an old video that I made some years ago of Christmas at Old Fort Concho, a fabulous three-day living history event that featured Indian dances, military drills, rowdy cowboys on horseback, campfire poetry readings, ladies-of-the-night as well as laundresses and other more "respectable" women working their crafts in dozens of tents set up across the parade grounds. The finale was a grand entrance by the Fort commander Colonel Grierson and his family in their horse-drawn buggy coming to attend a Christmas party. Sadly, these festivities have been discontinued and Christmas at Old Fort Concho now consists only of a more commercial event with vendors selling their wares in some of the buildings. But in the video my mom was a fetching sight in her stunning turquoise taffeta and lace officer's wife dress, dancing the Virginia Reel along with other officers and their wives as they enacted a typical Christmas celebration in the 1870's and 1880's.

Check out Layne's book "Moral Turpitude," available for only $2.99 at Smashwords.com. https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/159570

Hot Golf, Cool Baseball, Green Dreams

My mom's parched backyard

Only a few days remaining in our stateside travels before a most welcome return to Costa Rica. It’s amazing just how good the “green season” sounds, even with its promise of thunderstorms, after a couple of weeks of West Texas weather: bone dry, boiling hot days of 100+ temperatures and long, slow-roasting evenings in the 90’s. How do people live here, I ask myself over and over. In fact, I’ve asked a few residents and no one seems to have an answer. They get a silly grin on their faces, roll their eyes and shrug their shoulders.

        

But live here they do and incredibly, they even go outside during the day and survive -- grocery shopping, going to work, visiting the library, running errands. They even play golf!

         

Goodwill golf clubs

Which leads me to my topic for the day, my new golf clubs. Layne and I had transported our good clubs and bigheaded drivers from California to Portland last summer, thinking that with all the family golf players in Oregon, we’d probably get the most use out of them there. Climate change has made us re-think that notion since during most of our June visit this year, the weather was rainy and chilly -- not exactly my idea of good golf weather. We had a few nice days and managed to make the most of them with nine holes at King City one day and eighteen at Tri Mountain another. But we also had in mind putting together a set of clubs for use here in Texas so we could play when visiting my mom and perhaps even transporting some down to Costa Rica as well.

         

Since I’m not a terribly serious or skilled golfer, it had occurred to me that I might find an inexpensive set of clubs here in Texas on Craigslist. Indeed, there were some offered but none that fit the bill. I needed women’s clubs and didn’t want to spend much. But I never expected to find the clubs I needed at Goodwill.

         

Mother and I had gone to an enormous thrift store in town, Christians in Action. They had huge racks of clubs, organized only by size -- all 4 irons, 5 irons, etc. jammed together on stacked wooden frames. To figure out which were women’s clubs was a gargantuan project. Although the clubs were bargain-priced at $2.39 each, I was overwhelmed by the sheer number of clubs and the undertaking I faced in finding what I wanted from the hundreds there.

         

So-called "fairway" on the 5th hole

So on we went to Goodwill to see what they might have. What a surprise to find only a small number of clubs, easy to sort through, standing in a large open box. I quickly noticed “First Lady” on an iron and realized it was a woman’s club. It looked in pretty good shape so I continued looking through the selection and found the entire set was there, from the driver to 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 irons and a wedge -- all of the same brand, all in darned good condition. The price? Wait for it… 99 cents each! And if that wasn’t bonanza enough, I also found a nice bag, in better condition than my own, for $2.98. I got the whole set for about $12.

         

That’s the good news. The bad news was the condition of the municipal course I played on. Fairway? What fairway? Oh, you mean that dried out corridor with scraggly grass here and there and hard dirt everywhere else? Given the desperate drought conditions hereabouts, however, one could expect nothing else. So I’ve played twice now, early in the morning to avoid the heat, making the best of the course conditions and finding myself quite satisfied with my new irons. The driver leaves much to be desired but that may just be “operator error.”

         

It seems the secret to survival in this weather is to find something fun to do inside an air-conditioned building. To that end, Mother and I jumped in her air-conditioned car and drove a few blocks over to the air-conditioned Quartermaster Building at Fort Concho where a fascinating exhibit is on display depicting the history of women in baseball. Linedrives and Lipstick: The Untold Story of Women’s Baseball dispels the myth of women’s baseball as only a brief phenomenon of the 1940’s when the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League was in its heyday, later celebrated in the movie, “A League of Their Own,” starring Tom Hanks, Madonna and Geena Davis. Through photos, original posters, framed postcards, game programs and magazine articles, the exhibit reveals the birth of women’s ball in the mid-1800’s through the onset of the sport at women’s colleges, such as Vassar in 1866 and Smith College in 1879, and on to the present day crop of outstanding athletes swinging bats and hurling balls. Organized by Mid-America Arts Alliance, which takes their exhibitions into just 100 small and medium-sized communities each year, the exhibit in San Angelo is the only stop for the show in Texas. If Linedrives and Lipstick comes to your area, don’t miss it. It was well worth going out in the heat.

         

Now it’s on to Costa Rica and the luscious tropical weather I love. Pura Vida, here we come! 

Farewell to an Old Friend, Carrots to the New

It has been a tough holiday season for me, needless to say, having to put down my beloved Morgan horse, Indiana Mojave, two days after Christmas after more than 23 years of riding the trails together. That, plus the continuing worries about the health challenges of my family member has robbed me of any inspiration for writing a blog post. Traveling from Costa Rica to California, where I loaded up my suitcases with “stuff” we need in Atenas, then flying on to Texas to be with my mother has also tested my endurance as a traveler. The new airline rules on luggage fees, weight limits, change fees and such are really Draconian. Oddly enough, I found the easiest way around one of those issues is simply to cart your second bag to the gate and let them check it there. Although it would have cost an additional $35 had I checked my bag at the check-in counter, at the gate it was checked onboard at no charge. How silly is that?!

Another trick I used took advantage of the fact that Continental does not charge for the first bag. So, on the trip from Costa Rica on Continental, I put my one packed bag inside a bigger bag, the larger bag intended for the more heavily loaded return trip. (We have tons of stuff we would like to bring to Costa Rica, so every trip we load up).

The flight to California was a sentimental journey. On final approach into San Francisco International Airport (SFO), the big jet crossed over the Bay and circled downtown Oakland, giving me a nostalgic view of both the Bay Bridge and the Golden Gate Bridge. Lots of fun times there and people I love. However, even though I miss much about the San Francisco area, I wouldn’t trade its cool foggy weather, traffic congestion and high prices for my tranquilo life in Costa Rica.

Although I arrived on Christmas Eve, the expected holiday crowds at airports or on public transportation never really materialized, I’m happy to say. Riding on BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit) on Christmas Day as I commuted from my San Francisco airport hotel across the entire metropolitan area to Antioch, it was only me and a few other lone travelers for most of the ride. In San Francisco proper there were crowds between some stops but for the most part, it was a quiet trip.

The same cannot be said for my journey to Texas on the day before New Year’s Eve. Loaded down with two bags, the larger one now filled to its 50-pound limit, an overnight bag carrying two laptop computers, my purse and a coat, I was lucky to board the BART train at its initial station in Pittsburg/Bay Point or I might not have had a seat at all. Lugging those heavy suitcases around SFO and Dallas-Fort Worth Airport (DFW) taxed me physically, especially when the shuttle driver at DFW (which is a city-size monstrosity!) dropped me off at the wrong entrance for check-in, necessitating an exhausting trek through baggage claim areas to the American counter then back the same direction to my gate -- the farthest one, naturally! I was very glad to finally arrive here in San Angelo, Texas.

Officers' Row at Old Fort Concho

My mother’s home is located only a few blocks from historic Fort Concho, an old Army post from the late 1800s, and on my first morning walk I bundled up and headed toward the fort grounds to get some exercise in spite of the icy cold air. Located on the plateau where the North and Middle Concho Rivers join, Fort Concho is the best preserved of the Indian-era forts, with its original officers’ quarters running along one side of the huge parade grounds and the enlisted men’s barracks along the other, both built mostly of native limestone. Covering some forty acres and now designated as the Fort Concho National Historic Landmark, the old fort was home to Company “A” of the Tenth Cavalry, one of two all-black Army regiments known as “Buffalo Soldiers,” which helped patrol the frontier in the late 1800’s.

Well-preserved Officers' Quarters Three

The ruins of thick limestone walls 

Headquarters Building, across the Parade Grounds

The Post Hospital

Fort Concho Schoolhouse

Margie, the "Schoolmarm"

For many years my mother has served as a docent at the fort, leading tours of Officers’ Quarters Three and the Post Hospital in particular, and is extremely knowledgeable about Fort Concho history, the culture and practices of frontier life and the museum artifacts housed there. One of the colorful events held at the fort each year is “Christmas at Old Fort Concho,” a three-day living history panorama featuring period entertainment, artillery demonstrations, children’s workshops, military drills on horseback, shopping at numerous vendors booths and the Winter Rendezvous, where hundreds of costumed re-enactors at campsites across the parade grounds illustrate life in the Wild West of the 1800s. For her part, my mother dresses in a gorgeous teal green dress, modeling the clothing of an officer’s wife or at other times, in a modest long skirt and white blouse to serve as schoolmarm for “Frontier School,” an educational program for local fourth-graders. If you are ever in the West Texas area near San Angelo, a visit to the fort should be on your itinerary as it is a very special piece of American history.

On that first chilly hike, I wandered around the fort buildings and soon made my way toward the stables, where I knew I might find horses or mules housed. During public events, the animals are hitched to wagons or saddled for riding and used as part of the living history demonstrations. If I was lucky, I thought, I might find some equine residents at home. And indeed I did. Two very large jack mules, Mack and Joe, were standing by the fence as I approached that first day. Cautiously, I scratched and petted one and then the other through the fence, trying to make friends as they looked me over carefully. The next day I took carrots and the following day apples. As you can imagine, by now they look forward to my visits and welcome my attentions. As I look in their beautiful dark eyes, I am reminded of my sweet Mojave and know that I was lucky to have had him in my life. I hope he is galloping joyfully in green fields forever. Pura Vida, Mojave!