Introduction:

A former high school classmate and cherished old friend when reconnecting with Roger through Facebook quoted the old saying: "When God closes a door, he opens a window." The years have seen a number of life changes for us that make that adage ring true. After being blessed with good fortune, a wonderful son and great experiences, we decided to look out that window and prepare for more of what this wonderful life has to offer. We hope through our blog to share our journey from this point forward with family, with friends and with many others. Hopefully we'll make some new friends along the way. We hope you find our tales of some interest, even amusement and perhaps an inspiration for you to treat each and every day as an opportunity and an adventure to share with those who are an important part of your life.

Friday, June 28, 2013

Get on the bus and see Cuenca!

Roger on the bus during our first ride!
One of the first things many visitors do when arriving in Cuenca for the first time is head to Parque Calderon, the heart of the city and its historico centro. It is a beautiful spot to begin learning about our wonderful city.  On the south edge of the park, next to the Museo de Catredal Viejo (Museum of the Old Cathedral), is the parking spot for the double decker open top bus tours that can take yon on about an one hour motor tour of part of our wonderful city.

It's usually among the earliest things most people do while in town and a great way to learn about the city.  This is especially true if you can get a local friend to go along and explain most of the sights (there is a narration, but it is in Espanol).  The link below will show you a very condensed video of the bus route.

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Come to Cuenca and get on the bus!

Friday, June 21, 2013

It's about time!

It's overdue but it will be a short blog today...I've been recovering from a bug bite plus working on a painting project and Suzanne has got a really cool cross stitch thing going.  It's not that keeping you folks up to date on life here south of the equator isn't important...it's just that we are really getting a kick out of retirement life down here and have been keeping ourselves really really busy doing some serious fun stuff!

This is Roger in Quito at the Guyasamin Museo
Nothing to do with today's blog..just a cool photo!
Anyway, it's about time:

Our friends up north celebrated their longest day of sunlight today while we here in the southern hemisphere endured our shortest day.  Here in Cuenca, we were cut back to a brief 11 hours, 57 minutes and 22 seconds between our local sunrise and local sunset.  Back in December when you guys were whining about your shortest day, we had our longest...on that day the time between sunrise and sunset mushroomed into a startling 12 hours, 10 minutes and 55 seconds.  Needless to say we don't mess around with that nonsense called "daylight savings time".  The only time we reset clocks down here is when have a power outage or power surge.

As my friend and fellow blogger Clarke Greene would say:  "Life is sweet"

 (This is true even though Jif Peanut Butter has become more expensive down here...SuperMaxi figured out we really like the stuff better than the other U.S. brands so they priced it $1.58 higher than the others...it's volume really slowed down but it still outsells that stinky old Peter Pan!)

Anyway, we are are still alive and kicking and still glad to be "juntos en el camino de la vida!"