The Sky is Falling! The Sky is Falling!

We were on an EMT call yesterday when earth started to fall from the sky.  This particular flavor of earth was volcanic ash. It came down in a fine, brown mist that stunk of sulphur (or, as a fellow EMT put it, 'smelled like Satan').  Visibility was reduced to less than a quarter mile as the ash cloud rolled into Homer around 1:30pm.

They had been warning us for weeks that Mt. Redoubt, a 9,000 foot volcano 75 miles Northwest of Homer, AK, was set to erupt, and the volcano finally did deliver on Monday, but the wind was blowing to the north, and all the selfish people of Homer danced a jig because the volcanic ash poured down on the interior of Alaska, near Talkeetna, instead of on us.  

Well, apparently Mt. Redoubt frowned on such selfishness and let forth another  belch yesterday around 9am, throwing a plume of ash, steam, smoke and other smelly stuff to 60,000 feet.  The wind was blowing straight across the Cook Inlet towards Homer. When the ash started to fall, someone told me to put 'pantyhose' over the air intake on my car. I have been in Alaska two years and have yet to spot a pair of panty hose. They are certainly not stocked, and are possibly even illegal in the state.  I guess I will just change my air filter and hope for the best.

The ash fell for a couple hours, and then the sky turned blue and the sun came out to reveal that the whole world was covered in a gritty layer of brownish grey.  No flights were arriving or departing Anchorage, let alone Homer. The senior citizens and Y2K-type fanatics had cleared the shelves of the grocery store. My aunt called to tell me to start digging an outhouse to preserve water.  

Redoubt has erupted 3 more times since yesterday morning. We can't tell if what is falling right now is ash or snow. Al Gore's Internet claims that the ash is rolling towards Anchorage this time.  She's still kicking, but the majestic Mt. Redoubt has already covered an area the size of the I-94 corridor from Minneapolis to Chicago with a layer of ash, grounded hundreds of airplanes, stopped thousands of cars, and forced a whole bunch of people to walk around with bird flu masks on.  

Amazingly, if you check out CNN or FOXNEWS, they aren't really covering these eruptions. Usually, Alaskans are used to being ignored by the rest of America in all cases except those of political idiocy and corruption, but this time we're taking second chair to a national disaster in North Dakota? That seems a little insulting.  Besides, if it's not on Foxnews, how will my mom know to worry that her daughter has moved to the next Pompeii, or to ask how my outhouse is coming?

Honduras

I just got home from a country where you have to put your toilet paper in a bin next to the toilet. Anna and I were only in Honduras for five days, but we managed to see Mayan ruins, drive treacherous roads through mountain forests, see coffee beans being dried, snorkel with squid, and even enjoy some karaoke.  

We were met at the airport by a woman with a sign that

 read, "ANDERSON STEPHANIE."  Turns out she worked for the company I had rented a car from, and they didn't have an office at the airport. Oh, and she doesn't speak english. Oh, and the rental documents are all in Spanish. Please sign these three credit card slips, carte blanche. Gracias, here is a crappy American car, we're glad you Americans showed up to drive it.  Anna took a few years of Spanish in high school from someone that was reading it out of a book. And, I lived in a tourist town in Mexico for a few crazy months. Thus, our combined command of the language is as daunting to us as anyone trying to understand us.  We have trouble even asking directions to the bathroom.  Anna approached some Muchachos with fistfuls of money to swap dollars for Lempiras (or "limps" as we came to know them), and then we were on our way.

Driving in Honduras involves dodging everything: buses, semis, cows, horses, bikes, dogs,

chickens, potholes the size of Connecticut, ill-placed speed

 bumps, tractors, children, people peddling wares in the road, etc.  Our little Chevy maneuvered around and up and down the

 mountains through all the bumps and jostles, but not in the time frame we had planned from the comfort of our American interstate highway system.  It took us 4 hours to go from San Pedro Sula to Copan Ruinas... a journey of 200km (120miles).  

Copan Ruinas is home to my favorite Mayan ruins. This is not only because they have some of the best preserved hieroglyphs in the Mayan world, but because they are the only Mayan ruins I have ever seen. The ruins are an amazing testament to the Mayan culture, and we took lots of pictures of rocks trying to capture even a little of the scale.

We shared our tour of the ruins with a British couple, Kate and

 Justin, and somehow convinced them to track down the local hot springs with us. We should have known from our experience with the road that a 20km drive would take longer than a 20 km walk, but we pressed on through the hills and villages to find boiling springs pouring into a small river. This served as a local bath tub and bike wash, but we wallowed along with the locals and the sweltering fishes.

The next morning, Kate and Justin bravely hopped in the car with us for the drive to La Ceiba. Once we passed San Pedro Sula, the road surprised us by flattening, straightening out, and widening into multiple lanes. The police stopped us once, M16s hanging from their necks, but were frustrated by my Spanish enough to hurry us along.  We made the ferry dock in La Ceiba with time to spare and all four of us headed for the Bay Island of Roatan.  After one and a half hours and a little seasickness, we arrived on Roatan and were promptly attacked by taxi drivers competing to drive us to West End, the tourist town at, you guessed it, the west end of the island. Kate took no nonsense and got us a sweet deal.  

Have you ever noticed the weird things you see and people you meet in the simple task of

 finding a hotel?  Walking around a town and asking for room prices can really be an exhausting experience, and West End was no exception. The cabbie wanted a commision for walking us to a hotel, one hotelier practically cried when she told us she was booked for the night, one manager said she wouldn't serve people with backpacks, and one place was crawling with people not wearing shirts. We ended up at a fantastic spot, Half Moon Bay Resort, but didn't really realize our luck until the sun rose the next day and we saw the snorkeling right off our front deck.

Roatan was a place full of tourists and divers, and I was really surprised how much like a Mexican resort town West End was.  Kate quipped that diving is really just about looking cool and wearing the t-shirt and there was plenty of posturing going on along the streets and at the bars.  After two days of snorkeling, we had to head back for the mainland, but instead of heading straight for the airport we decided to make one more stop.

Tela is a beach town an hour outside of San Pedro Sula. We began the hunt for a room again and were told, while looking at a dingy, stuffy, run down hotel, that we'd better book now because it was Saturday night and Valentines day. Anna questioned the romantic demand on this particular option, but the joke was lost in translation. We ended up at a budget hotel, reasoning that we had to get up at 4am.  Lucky for the other budget travelers, they had to get up too, because after we went to bed early for our early wake up, a few late night arrivals parked our car in.  

Faithfully, some people from our office-less car rental met us at 6:30am and we made our plane. We rolled into George Bush International in Houston and flashed our passports at customs. None of the immigration officers say "Welcome Home" anymore. They're all too suspicious. We even got questioned for not having enough luggage... it may now be illegal to NOT bring suspicious items into the country.  But at least there's the toilet paper... flush! down the toilet. Must be home.

The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer

My review

rating: 5 of 5 stars
Fantastic. Laughed, cried, learned. After two pages, I was a little annoyed: "This is a whole book of a bunch of letters? Come on." By the end: "How creative, to develop such vivid characters and an interesting story and history using only letters!"
I have already gifted it to two people.

View my book reviews at Goodreads.com.