APR-B-4

FINAL “PUNCH-OUT” WITH MIKE ON DERWOOD DETAILS, WITH THE FINAL BUILDING INSPECTIONS

DUE NEXT WEEK, AND A ROADSIDE TRANSFER FROM DALE KRAMER OF BINOCULARS IRRETRIEVABLE FROM THE TRASHED AND RE-MOVED STORAGE AREAS;

THEN BY METRO AND AMERICAN AIRLINES,

LAUNCH THE FLIGHTS SOUTH THROUGH MIAMI TO LIMA, PERU

April 15, 2004

I am groggy from the still hooked-on-Far East time zones as I hear the chatter of Spanish, and realize where I am. I am in the capital of South America—Miami International Airport. I am enroute to the capital of Peru, in Lima, and wanted to find an electric outlet in MIA to take a toke for my laptop very limited battery. I found two, but each had very large bodies sprawled in fort of them, none of whom saw any reason to move since they were not using the outlet, but they were not going to spend any time in exertion. That exertion is what I have just done, since I had to make it all the way across MIA in a very user-unfriendly passage to get from the DCA-MIA flight to the Lima flight. It took me about half of the 30 minutes advertised on the signs, but at very sharp pain. My left pyriformis has selected this time to act up in the most inflammatory pitch it has made to date. This comes when I have not been running or exercising in any way.

Except to get up at 2:000 AM as I did this morning. I packed the car in the predictable rain, and went to Derwood to make one more try at finding things which are all stored away impossible to retrieve. I needed binoculars and mosquito repellent, and climbed over upturned tables standing on the table legs which gave way beneath me as I tried to reach the archery case. I had moved the gun case in the basement and opened it, but there were no binoculars there.

I gave up on my search and walked around in the final “punch out” that Mike and I walked around to check for the next two weeks details to be fixed. HE is going through the inspections this next week to correct whatever they find is in their sheets of un-code exceptions and then it will be ready to move back in. Even Sandy Shelar will be coming back over to put in the last furniture pieces as precisely as she can in the places where they were spotted but were moved by the additional details of finishing work.

Dale Kramer called in follow-up to my call to him asking about his colonoscopy outcome. Everything was fine. I also visited Carl Dees and got my haircut when I had learned that he would be getting his ankle fused on Friday. I told Dale that I would be making a trip to the Eastern Shore to pick up the three deer and a red fox to finish the mounts to be installed in the Game Room. I told him I could not find binoculars and he told me he had a pair in his truck and was on Bethesda’s Fernwood Road, as I was driving along the spur of 495. So, I wheeled around and picked up the binoculars, the last item I needed before heading in to the DCA.

A DROWSY START TO THE TWO JUMPS TO PERU.

WITH A STARTING TRIP TO MIA,

CAPITAL OF SOUTH AMERICA, AND THEN TO LIMA,

TO PREPARE FOR TOMOORW’S FLIGHT TO IQUITOS WHERE WE WILL BOARD THE “ORION”

I am now over Biscayne Annex as we take off in the 757 for the five and a half hours flight to Lima, one time zone west of Eastern Daylight time. I have done whatever I could, including talking to a kindly man with a badge, who will personally take my letter just written and carry it out as he leaves, where the only mail drops are on the far side of security check in so that I could never make it here in time to board if I stepped out just to mail a letter. As it is, with my limp from a sad pyriformis muscle—from which I had ant heard much in the pest few months, I arrived at the gate in only the quick time it took me to plug in to boot up the lap[top, and to hear my rows being called to board the flight.

This is a Grand Adventure of the kind that is made to order for me. I have been an explorer of Amazonas from the Venezuelan side and the Orinoco, which I followed all the way to the open ocean through the Delta Amacuro on a bird watching trip as well as fishing expeditions in the jungle with my friend Luis Ayala. Now I can see the bigger of the rainforests and the larger of the waterways—largest on planet earth. We will be in a new and spacious cruise boat which makes it this long way from the sea as many ocean going vessels can up the Mighty Amazon. I may be making my last major photojournalism expeditor based in the film as opposed to electronics—as the transition from ballpoint to this laptop has been fraught with techno glitches, but the information thus recorded is much more manipulable and transmissible. So, standby for the story of the “Amazing Amazon.”

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