Where in the World?

Well, I’ve heard the first one is the hardest. Guess I’ll see after I’ve written a few more.

Blogs that is.
Something I never thought of doing. In fact any connection to a blog was nonexistent. Several things
have driven me to this. Some I understand, some I don’t. Since it is far easier to explain the reasons I
understand, I’ll start there.

Anyway, here goes. I don’t want this to be a travel blog that offers advice or travel information. My main goal is to share my perspective I’ve gained while traveling to some far-off and really off-the-wall locations. Not a bit unusual in the world of scuba divers. I swear as much as I travel, no matter how distant and remote I go I have a friend that’s been there. I keep trying to get to the most remote place nobody has been to, but in the world of scuba diving, I just have not managed that! Not yet, anyway.

What I do have in my favor is that I started early. Really early. My mother believes that the on the day of my birth the doctor yanked me out, held me up by my heels, spanked me on the butt and handed me a suitcase. As an infant there was some travel that try as I might, I cannot remember.
Awhile back I decided to go back to the place where my first memories of life occurred to retrace how this travel addiction began. My first conscious thoughts occurred in Rio de Janrio, Brazil. As a kid I lived on Copa Cabana Beach. Well, at least at every moment I could get there. Since we lived only blocks away, it was quite often. The outcome of this experience was that I thought every boy had an ocean and a beach.
The other factor that probably contributed to my rather eclectic travel addiction was the reason the family was in Brazil. My dad somehow scored a job in the avionics department of the national airline, Cruzero de Sul. Saying my parents were party animals would be an accurate description and they often needed me to be elsewhere. It became a regular event to place me in the jump seat in the cockpit of one of the airplanes to ship me off to places like Lima Peru, to go visit family friends for the weekend. So that compounded the already growing problem, because I came to believe that not only did every boy have a beach and an ocean, they also had an airplane!
Now that could have been fine and really not amounted to a problem but at some point things went terribly wrong! We moved back to the states and to of all places, Irving Texas! Back then it was a small burg between Dallas and Ft. Worth, and it had no beach.
At that time in Texas folks just did not mix at all. Every race, color and creed had its own location. I was thrown into a public elementary school of middle class white kids. That didn’t work for me. So many of my friends in Brazil were black native Brazilians and Europeans. Nothing but white kids seemed pretty boring to me. What I didn’t realize until later was that the other kids didn’t think I was white. I wondered all year why nobody would play with me at recess. You see, I was quite tan, in fact brown. I had not in any form mastered the English language because I had been speaking mostly Portuguese and rarely needed  English. So, with the skin color and speech issue all the kids were wondering how a Mexican kid got into their school. It became pretty clear to me that the one goal in life was to get out of there as fast as I could! My thought was “How far is this place called Mexico and I wonder if they have a beach.”

That pretty much cemented what today has become a desire to see as much of this great planet as time and God will allow. I hope to share some of the adventures with one or two of you that happened across this blog and had the time to read it. We’ll see how it goes!