Alaska or Mexico?

 Since the only traveling I'm doing during the pandemic of 2020 is virtually, I'm rereading some early blog pieces and publishing ones I think are worthy of a second look.This was my first visit to Alaska when I could not help but compare it to my newly adopted home in Mexico.

A rare sunny day in Alaska.

I leaned from the bed and stretched a hand towards the window to pull back the “darkening” shade, then plucked apart the slats of the blind with two fingers. Would I find rain or sunshine? My cousins and I planned a trip to Glacier Gardens, but it wouldn’t be much fun in a cold rain.

“You might get one day of sunshine a week,” a wizened sourdough told us when we first arrived in Alaska, “if you’re lucky.” I guess the Weather Channel web site hadn’t made a typo when the ten-day forecast for Southeastern Alaska predicted rain every single day.

I knew this part of Alaska was a rain forest, but I was hoping the rain always fell at night the way it does in Ajijic. Mexico. Actually it always did fall at night. And in the morning and in the afternoon and in the evening.

Death on a Sunday Afternoon

Since the only traveling I'm doing during the pandemic of 2020 is virtually, I'm rereading some early blog pieces and publishing ones I think are worthy of a second look.

The bull that will die this afternoon must have thought he’d survived the worst that could happen. He’d lived on a ranch for three years with no human contact. Yesterday, when he was forced into a truck, the men using metal prods remained hidden. Being shoved into a truck after a life on the open range is frightening. Bulls resist. One died yesterday as a result of the manipulation and another lost one of his horns.