Day 221, Year 6 Photos and Shopping
Date: Thursday, June 2, 2011
Weather: Sunny and Hot (low 90’s)
Location: Lightkeepers Marina, Little River, South Carolina
Sorting through five and half years of photos from all around the world and choosing only the best of the best is NOT an easy task for me. I seem to be personally attached to each photo and not including each one is painful. But I am making progress. It is just difficult to summarize everything in one neat hour-long presentation. One thing I have discovered while doing this is just how similar many places around the world really are. The limestone rocks eroded to razor sharp points that we saw in Madagascar, we also saw in New Caledonia back in the Pacific. But we had forgotten all about that. Plants of the world are like the people. They have migrated from one place to another so that tropical plants with origins in the South Pacific are common in the Caribbean and visa versa. Plants that we thought were endemic to South Africa’s Cape region we also saw on the South Island of New Zealand. The outrigger canoes of the South Pacific are identical to the pirogues of Madagascar. Many birds and fish are the same everywhere, just with different names and sometimes different colors. And on and on go the similarities. We went to a beach restaurant on the island of Ko Lanta in Thailand named “Same, Same but Different” and we have adopted that name for our presentation.
Just before lunch, I halted the photo sorting and we all drove to Myrtle Beach to Costco to buy food for the upcoming family get-together. Mark and I were amazed at how cheap some things are here compared to other places in the world. Diesel fuel and engine oil are definitely cheaper here in the US and even tropical fruits like mangoes and limes are much cheaper here than they are in the Caribbean. The quality is not the same, but the price is right. The one thing that amazed me was the extremely low cost of chicken breasts. At Costco you can buy 26 large frozen chicken breasts for $16. That makes chicken breast cheaper than hamburger. That’s not the case in most of the rest of the world. And then later in the evening we went out to eat at a Mexican restaurant where margaritas and beer were less than $3. All four of us were able to eat fantastic Mexican dinners with drinks for about $10 a person. Not as cheap as Thailand or India, but not as expensive as we expected.
Tomorrow Mark is taking a few members of the local Power Squadron out for a sail and I’ll continue sorting through photos. So go the days.
