Troll Echos

I likely qualify as a reasonably “normal guy.”  I am in generally good health, I am happily married, I am gainfully employed, etc.  The main problem I had was nagging and common headaches.  Regularly I attributed the headaches to shifts in atmospheric pressure since I could tell you with clockwork accuracy whether it was going to rain later in the same afternoon or some time tomorrow just by how bad the headache was.  Sometimes the headaches were incredibly painful.  I regularly found myself taking Tylenol or Advil at least once a day, and often two or three times a day.  Every now and then I would get a day off for good behavior.

And so I lived for years.  Fearful for my liver with all the pain killers I was running through it, I sought the answer aggressively in little spurts when the headaches were particularly bad.  No answer, no one’s blog, no medical web site had any obvious answer that didn’t involve prescription pain killers or migraine medicine.  Then, without warning they vanished.  Entirely.  Then they came back again.

It was like a mystery to solve.  I had found the secret without knowing it, or likely even realizing it until it was too late.  Reminded that I had fixed it by the glaringly obvious return of the headaches instead of the subtle absence of them.  I looked over the month long gap in headaches and nothing stood out especially clearly as the solution.

Like any well meaning office drone, I live my life bouncing back and forth between eating properly and well, not-so-much, as I try to keep a life sitting down at a computer from ruining my body.  During the month of missing headaches I wasn’t on any diet plan, so that wasn’t it.  I wasn’t working out, I wasn’t stress free, I wasn’t doing anything different.  But I must have been, regular headaches don’t just stop without warning.

Then while walking through my local warehouse club store I turned down, of all places, the snack aisle.  I remembered a while back having purchased a big box of Fiber One bars, and I remember enjoying them tremendously.  They are after all, delicious.  Probably the tastiest granola type bars made by anyone.  Not thinking of the headaches that were once again just a part of my daily life, I picked up another box, purchased it, and wandered home.

The headaches vanished again, replaced by intense gas pressure in my gut, but I was paying attention this time.  The secret appeared to be fiber.  I once considered myself to be eating approximately correct amounts of things.  I ate reasonably well thanks to my wife’s wonderful cooking.  I had meats and veggies and starches and grains and fruits on a basically daily basis.  Somehow it wasn’t enough.  After a couple of weeks of eating a single Fiber One bar a day, the gas pain vanished as my body got used to higher amounts of fiber in my diet.  The headaches stayed gone.

My track record at this point for around eight months of daily Fiber One bars is roughly twenty Tylenol, and not all of those were for headaches.  From using two to six a day, to two per month on average.  By adding a simple tasty granola bar to my daily routine, I now use virtually no pain killers for headaches at all.  So to all you out there with unexplainable headaches, try a Fiber One bar every day for a little while.  It may not be the solution you need, but for me it was the “magic pill” I’d been looking for without success for nearly a decade and I’m eternally grateful these delicious things were invented.

Welcome to Maui.  Land of tropical pleasures, amazing landscapes, twisted crazy roads, and fantastic culture.  Come for fruity drinks with umbrellas and food that may remind you of a 1950′s drive-in, complete with as much fat and cholesterol as you could possibly want in your vacation food.  Leave because the locals hate you.

Any lovely evening at a luau should be enough to educate you about a bit of Hawaiian history and would teach about 100s of years of history and mythology before Hawaii became the 50th United State in 1959.  If that weren’t enough, they enjoyed a generally well managed monarchy until we (the USA) came in and abolished it all.  In their minds, generally speaking, this was not an excellent day for them.  (August 21st, 1959 to be exact.)

Don’t get me wrong here, not all of the locals are bitter and angry.  A vast portion of them are actually very friendly.  Those tend to be the ones that either understand basic economics or at least work for someone that does.  People of Hawaiian decent that are near a resort are likely to be some of the friendliest people you’ve ever met.  Travel out into the middle of no where and all bets are off.

No where is this more true than on the Road to Hana.  This particular road clocks in at a mere 52 miles in length but offers the sadistic driver almost three hours of driving in each direction and yes, if you drive it once you have almost no choice but to drive it back later.  Each pass of this road includes 620 turns, 59 bridges (46 of which are only one lane) and hundreds of stretches of one lane road with “yield to oncoming traffic” signs and no indication of where that oncoming traffic could be coming from.

Our trip lasted almost exactly seven hours, put us through double the number of one lane bridges, turns, and miles and subjected us to raw hatred without cause.  Not typically what you would expect to hear about a well known tourist attraction I suppose, but as I mentioned before, the locals hate you.  I can only imagine that they hate that it takes you three hours to drive the road they would rather complete in one, and they hate that you personally abolished their kingdom and forced being a state down their throats.  Locals are often as easy to recognize as you are as a tourist.  You are the couple in a rented car driving at generally sane speeds, they are the seven people in a single rusted white pickup truck that literally yell and swear at you as you go by or nearly run you off the road as they pass you in the middle of turns 375 and 376.  Whatever gene it is that allows someone to think it is a good idea to pass you in a one lane road full of twists and turns, I find myself quite glad to have evolved beyond possessing it.

If the nausea, screaming headache, and general exhaustion wasn’t bad enough the destructive emotional force of unwarranted hatred left me a bit depressed for almost the whole next day.  My advice to you is to go to Maui for all the good things, eat cheeseburgers with high calorie toppings, drink silly looking drinks with fruits you’ve never even heard of, and to skip the Road to Hana entirely.  The drive sucked, the locals are mean and angry, the view while interesting was not at all unique after the 400th turn, and when people tell you there is nothing in Hana at all they are being kind to the town as a whole.  Nothing doesn’t begin to describe what was waiting for us at the half way point of seven hours of hell.

There was literally a police station, a resort you aren’t allowed on, and a general store.  If you are looking for more than that, you are wasting your time, it’s just not there.  We had heard there was nothing in Hana, but as the destination of a massive tourist trap we figured there would at least be a little something to do.  We were flat wrong.

After months of hard labor at my job I was hitting a breaking point.  I was tired, overworked, and simply needed a change of scenery.  My wife came to the rescue with a weekend away at the Ceasar’s Poconos resorts in the Poconos mountains in Pennsylvania.  We arrived Saturday morning and left Sunday at around noon but it did the trick for relieving stress and changing scenery.  We were surprised by how short of a drive it actually was.  Including a stop for coffee at a Dunkin Donuts on the way, we arrived a mere two hours and five minutes after we left home.

Once on the property of the Cove Haven branch of the resort, the first thing you’ll notice is that the resort itself is quite dated looking.  It makes you feel a bit like you stepped back in time to an era complete with disco balls and leisure suits.  If you ignore the cheese factor of your surroundings, or in fact if you enjoy them for nostalgic or comedic reasons, the place is quite nice.  We stayed in the Adam and Eve “Apple” Suites section of the Cove Haven resort.  The building itself is a one story tall space ship looking building without a single window, but inside we found a nice layout and plenty of lights to cancel any gloom that may be created by the lack of windows and the explanation of how a “two floor” room can possibly exist in a one story tall building.

The brochure would have you believe that your room is “two floors” and that will undoubtedly inspire ideas of, well, there being two floors worth of space in your room.  That really is a bit misleading however, as you likely figured out when you saw that it was a one story building.  In reality your door puts you on the “first floor”, shortly after walking in you should immediately turn on the lights lest you fall down the three steps that separates this floor from the “second floor.”  In a stretch of logic you could in fact pretend that those three steps have placed you on an all new floor, and through that you could even likely get away with calling the pool room a “third floor” thanks to the two additional steps you must go down to get to it.  Overall, the room in all its parts, and floors, is quite spacious.

The first floor includes what I would call your second TV, a heart shaped hot tub, a sofa complete with end tables, lamps, and a coffee table.  The second floor has the fireplace, your big TV, your bed, a walk-in closet, and access to the bathroom and pool room.  The third floor separated thankfully by a glass door and windows contains your personal pool and sauna.  During our stay many interesting adventures occurred and some are worth metioning to help keep other people from screwing things up like I did. 

Each room comes with a fireplace and a requirement that you can only burn Duraflame type logs in it.  Buy your Duraflame log at a grocery store or Walmart or something before you go.  We brought our own log, but only because we were warned by friends to do so.  They will happily sell you a log if you failed to bring your own for around three times the cost you would expect to pay anywhere else.  The important things to note about burning your Duraflame logs is that the fireplace has no flue to open or close, so don’t bother spending much time trying to find it to make sure it’s open.  There is a metal log holder thing in there to put your log on, but before you do so, center it in the fireplace and push it all the way to the back wall.  When you put your log on it, put that all the way against the back wall as well.  I didn’t figure this out until our room started smelling smokey thanks to the smoke preferring to waft around instead of simply rising into the chimney.  I was forced to use the ash tray that held the free matches to push the log toward the back long after it was burning at a normal pace.  An exciting and warm experience to say the least, and the only thing I could find that wouldn’t burn that I could use to push the log with.

The heart shaped tub was a cute concept but it rapidly turned into a scene out of some weird horror movie thanks to the bubbles we had put into it while it was filling.  A pattern taken from drawing a bubble bath at home in a normal tub.  We picked up our bottle of bubbles from the porn store section at the back of the gift shop, and I highly recommend bringing your own bubble bath stuff thanks to the price mark up.  What I failed to fully realize was that a hot tub, complete with interesting water jets, takes tiny amounts of bubble bath soap and turns in into mountains of bubbles.  The only advice I can offer is that you fill the tub first, turn on the jets, and only then, add bubble bath stuff slowly, a few drips at a time and see how it goes before adding more.  I didn’t use that much stuff and we were forced to drain the tub and start again without adding more bubbles.  In the end, we gave up on being able to watch TV, sip wine, and enjoy the hot tub thanks to this mess.

The pool room is small, but kinda nice.  The sauna was really a closet sized cedar walled room with the sauna heater in it.  Both rooms were well suited to two people.  I know this is probably pretty obvious considering its a couples resort, but I would recommend against booking a room for more than two people.  The pool was warm and the right depth and was my personal favorite feature of the room even if it was a bit small.  For some reason, late at night, they seemed to turn down the temperature of the pool and the pool room.  This made it less enjoyable for my wife and I but not to the point where we didn’t want to use it.

When dinner time came around, we returned to the place where we had eaten our included breakfast.  Unlike breakfast where getting a table to sit at alone was quite easy to do, there was a very long wait for a table to eat dinner at alone.  We skipped the long wait and accepted that we would be sitting with a bunch of strangers for dinner.  By the end of the night we were pretty good friends with our dinner companions and conversation flowed easily.  My advice is to seek out a table to sit alone for breakfast since your brain isn’t likely to be working on all cylinders early in the morning before lots of coffee, but to happily accept the company in the evening for dinner.

The activities provided were quite extensive and frankly quite fun, but I don’t think I would be able to find much to do without lots of repeating things if we had stayed more than a couple of days.  It was a nice change of pace to ice skate, rollerskate and shoot arrows in the archery range.  The standard sporty fare of mini-golf, boccie ball, tennis, ping pong and things like that were all free, but expect to be shelling out quarters or tokens for arcade games and air hockey tables.  

If the local activities have worn thin and you find yourself looking for things to do, there are a collection of somewhat famous outlet stores less than an hour away, or less if you are staying at a resort that is not the Cove Haven resort.  Be prepared to follow your wife around while she shops happily though.  If you are the nature type, also less than an hour away, but inconveniently not in the same direction as the outlet stores, is Bushkill Falls, a lovely woodsy hike with the “Niagra of Pennsylvania” waterfall to stare at and take pictures of for later memories.  Thanks to being tired and my lack of desire to take countless pictures of a landscape still brown with winter we didn’t end up paying the admission price to walk back to the falls for this trip, but I would very much like to return.

All things considered, I would definitely return for another romantic weekend in the Poconos, but I also definitely wouldn’t want to stay for more than a couple of nights.  It’s extremely convenient thanks to being close to home, and it was plenty of fun while we were there.

I’m not sure if insects can fly hundreds of miles across open ocean, or for that matter, if they even want to, but as far as I can tell they can’t.  St. Lucia was delightfully lacking in the typical insects of the Northeast.  I don’t recall seeing a single mosquito dispite the almost constant presence of puddles and standing moisture they so love.  We as honeymooners were not alone on the island however.

Everywhere you look there were frogs the size of a quarter, large snales, and lizards that would impress Geiko.  Whether they were actually geckos or not I have no idea. The frogs hung out on frondy plants that hung near the short sidewalk lights that were all over the grounds of the resort.  My wife and I came to call them “Frog condos” thanks to the multi-layered housing effect and the fact that we often so more than one of them near a single light.  The idea of housing or warmth was quickly replaced with the reality that they were hanging out for a midnight snack made up of any tiny light attracted bugs that were silly enough to pass within tongue range of the tiny amphibious hunters.

During the day lizards basked in the sun on anything they could find.  Sometimes it was the same lights the frogs made into hunting zones, other times it was random guard rails or plants, but most often it was literally in the middle of the sidewalk.  My initial thoughts at this pattern were along the lines of “well, I guess you are next on evolutions list to elimitate for playing in traffic.”  How truly wrong I was.  Never in my life have I seen an animal so like a ninja before.  3 inches of lizard could go from apparently asleep in the sidewalk to simply gone before you even knew it was moving.  They moved very quickly, and were nervous enough about people that you couldn’t even get closer than about 4 or 5 feet from them before they did their vanishing act again.  This turned my wife and I into very frustrated photographers indeed.

On the exact opposite end of the speed spectrum was the humble snail in its not so humble shell.  They were large, they were slow, and frankly they were short lived.  I personally squashed at least one during our stay by stepping on it in the dark without knowing it was there.  Walking up the roads at night revealed that they didn’t have much better luck with vehicle traffic either.  There were creepy slippery smears of snail guts and shell bits all over the roads every night just waiting for the next day’s torential rain to wash them away into oblivion.

It should stand to reason that countless pirate songs can’t all be wrong when describing the islands.  They drink a lot of rum.  I had no idea how much in fact.  They have types and flavors of rum you have never heard of, half of which would make any self-respecting pirate blush a little.  If the idea of chocolate rum, orange rum, and even ginger rum aren’t out there enough for you, they also make drinks using these crazy rums by adding everything from fruit juice to actual fruit to cream and an unlimited number of other things.  If you don’t like rum, you should consider visiting some other part of the world that hasn’t yet made its way into pirate songs.

Not to complain, but inclusive seems to have many definitions.  My wife would chime in at this point to remind me that all “All Inclusive” places follow a similar model, and I’m certain she’s correct.  My problem is at least partially based on the fact that I’ve never been to an all inclusive resort before, and before I give Sandals a bad name I would like to point out that it was certainly “mostly inclusive.”  

Resorts are big business.  There is really no other intelligent way to describe it.  To that end, they do everything in their power to get as much money out of you as possible before and during your stay.  Before we arrived they successfully sold us safari adventures and romantic dinners for two with exclusive butler service and candle light.  During our stay the choices were almost endless.

Tipping was strictly forbidden on Sandals property, that I am infinitely thankful for based on our experience at the airport.  Generally speaking, everything you want was included.  Assuming you only wanted food and drinks.  Wine lists were provided at almost every single meal, and they cost extra.  While wondering the resort, the uncommonly pushy camera men working for the little photo shop were around almost every corner like paparazzi.  Instead of taking pictures of you, they were there to ask if you wanted them to.  Trust me when I say that is almost as annoying.  Needless to say, pictures taken cost nothing, unless you actually want them.  That meant paying for them.  The gift shop was about as overpriced as any other you find in the tropics, but was obviously not included in the price of admission.  There was also an almost constant presence of staffers trying to sell you time in their spa or convincing you to book a return visit.

It wasn’t all bad of course, just a little overwhelming sometimes for a guy on the first real vacation of his entire professional career.  Thanks to the free meals being readily available, for some time after arriving back home I actually worried that I would go out to eat somewhere and simply get up and leave when I was done as I had done so many times on my honeymoon.  The experience of being able to order a 3 to 5 course meal with an alcoholic drink at every meal without concern for price was an awesome one indeed.  So, if you go to an all inclusive, be ready to to say “No.”  almost constantly to the attempts to upsell pictures, wine, and anything else they can think of.  It will still be a blast and a great excuse to put on some extra inches to the old waistline.

No trip to the tropics during hurricane season is complete without almost having to deal with a hurricane.  Ours included.  Hurricane Omar moved through the area around 200 miles from St. Lucia while we were there.  Since it was rainy season while we were there and there was rain everyday anyway, few people even noticed.  The effect if had on our tiny little island was nothing more than large waves thankfully.  

At the edge of our resort and just past the massive pool is a large stone wall with convenient stairs going down to the beach at random intervals.  When the seas were normal and happy, water never made it anywhere near that wall.  In fact in most places there were 20 to 70 feet of beach.  During the time when Omar was exerting its climatological influences the waves were actually around eight feet tall and were hitting the stone wall with enough force to throw salty mist at people in the pool.  

After a few hours of pounding waves the worst was over and the seas began to slip away back to their original position several yards from the wall.  The damage was done however.  The beach was effectively gone.  In its place was an impressive collection of rocks of all shapes and sizes and almost no sand at all.  The last step down to the beach from one of the sets of stairs was now slightly over three feet tall instead of the previous size of about a normal step.  Thankfully the ocean happily works itself out, and in so doing works things back to the way they are supposed to be.  Several days after the waves subsided, normal waves slowly dragged sand that had been churned up back to the beach and deposited it gently back over the rocks occasionally grabbing a rock and dragging it back out to sea as it left.  

At the end of the day it was very cool to see larger waves than are available anywhere in the northeast and I’m glad they weren’t any more dangerous than mere photo opportunities.

It was bound to happen.  It seems everytime I travel anywhere I end up sick in some way or other.  I’m not sure why it happens, or how I got so lucky to have this pattern, but it does.  Some may say, “Well you sat on a plane with 200 other people for over 6 hours.”, but that’s not it because I’ve gotten sick driving to Vermont in my own car too.  Best of all, there is never any obvious cause of the illness.  I’m just sick, that’s all, thanks for playing, and with any random collection of symptoms.

In the tropics, my body’s choice was a day of mild fever (100.5F) followed by almost non-stop trips to the bathroom.  The rest of this story is not for the squimish and you may want to go on to another post prior to getting to my brief but descriptive story of Liquishits™.

For lack of a more graceful way to describe what happened to me, I will say that I would sit down and make a noise something like someone pouring a bucket of water into a toilet.  Gut wrenching pain and about 3 seconds of high-speed Liquishits™ and it was time to clean up after what seemed like a war.  If that wasn’t bad enough, there was a day where I would leave the now partially destroyed wreck of a bathroom only to return to the same freak show mere minutes later.  I said many times during our stay “My kingdom for a solid poop.”, but it was not meant to be.  The gut wrenching pain tapered off, the frequency of Liquishits™ lessened to about once after each meal, and the consistancy got a little less liquidy, but the solidity was not restored until I got home.

It wasn’t pretty, sorry you had to read that.  There’s nothing to see here, move along.

Living in America has all soda drinkers very used to things like sodium benzoate (to preserve freshness) and high fructose corn syrup in their day to day bubbly sugar water consumption.  Down in the Caribbean however, corn is missing, sugar cane is grown everywhere, and preservatives are not something you are likely to find in anything you eat or drink.  This produces an interesting opportunity indeed.  One where a soda drinker can enjoy outstandingly delicious soda.

My soda of choice here in America is Coka-Cola.  Good old fashioned high test sugar laiden brown bubble water.  Sadly the ingredients on the American version of Coke include things like “Sugar and/or High Fructose Corn Syrup”, which to me indicates that they mix all their sweeteners together and at the end have honestly no clue how much of each ends up in each bottle.  Presumably they mix them and the desired ratio ends up in each bottle or the flavor of a bottle of Coke would vary widely, and it clearly doesn’t vary much at all.  Down in the tropics however, something wonderful was waiting for me behind that red label I know so well.

At first I never even thought to look at the ingredients.  I opened a bottle of Coke from our well stocked mini-fridge and took a sip.  Something was very wrong.  It was like Coke, but not exactly.  It was delicious.  Outstandingly delicious.  I sat there with the bottle in my hand and felt a bit like a polar bear that just enjoyed another Christmas Coca-Cola.  A grin, a feeling of peace.  Heck, it was soda nirvana.  I slowly twisted the bottle around to find the nutritional information panel and the ingredient list so I could see why this Coke tasted so much better than any I’d ever had.  The nutritional information panel was entirely missing.  No calories, no carbs, no fat, no nothing.  The ingredients however was a shorter list than I’d ever seen on a bottle of Coke and revealed exactly why this bottle I held in my hand brought a smile to my face like no other bottle of soda ever has before.

Ingredients:  Carbonated Water, Sugar, Caramel Colour, Phosphoric Acid, Natural Flavors, Caffeine.

That was it.  Real sugar.  100%.  And no preservatives at all.  To my friends at Coke:  Please offer this recipe here in America.  It’s so much better than the version you sell here I could hardly imagine drinking standard American Coke ever again, and would happily pay a premium if required to get “the good stuff.”

Once loaded up onto the bus to Sandals Regency we were off for what I could only describe as an, uh, “exciting” trip.  A bus on St. Lucia is more like a large mini-van with extra seats crammed into it.  Before I can explain how the trip to the resort was, I need to explain a couple of things about the island itself.

St. Lucia is a volcanic island formed almost entirely by a single large volcano near its center but offset slightly toward the southern end of the island.  Due to either volcanic chance or perhaps erosion patterns the island’s mountains have an almost starfish like quality.  There is a large set of peaks with many very steep ridges and valleys radiating outward toward the sea.  Because of these ridges, the obvious approach to road construction was to simply try to go around.  For this reason almost all of the cities on the island are near the ocean and there is effectively one large road that goes all the way around the island.  Before the concept of a road that “goes around a mountain” gels up too solidly in your head, think back to the humble starfish. Imagine one with not five but closer to twenty legs.  Then instead of radiating out in equidistant straight lines make it more like a tangled twisty mess as would be drawn by a child with a mountain colored crayon.

Now try to imagine the road that would be forced to go up and down this crazy freak of a starfish to avoid sending its traffic out into the ocean.  That, my friends, is the road that we had to take from the airport at the very bottom of the island to the resort at the very top.  As the crow flies, the island cities we were traveling between are no more than twenty miles apart, but the drive clocked in at almost exactly an hour of crazy turns and hills. Beyond geological concerns, the driver in a car sits on the right side of the car, drives on the left side of the road, and enjoys an almost complete lack of traffic laws beyond that.

As far as I managed to learn from the times when I had my eyes open during the drive, there are generally no speed limits on the island unless you are near cities.  The general idea is, “get there as fast as you possibly can without flying off a mountain or crashing into anything.”  Also, since some folk like to try for land speed records and others seem to drive vehicles without engines that have greater than six horsepower, passing each other isn’t just something you occasionally do, it’s actually part of driving anywhere and happens all the time.  To make that slightly more exciting than it would otherwise be, remember that there is basically one road.  Now put an entire island worth of traffic onto it.  See what I mean yet?

If that wasn’t enough, it rains for almost six months straight every year and is dry for the other six.  The effect that has on roads may not be immediately obvious, so let me explain how it goes well beyond wet slippery roads.  The entire island was constructed with drainage ditches to try to keep things like cars and people and bananas from washing away.  These ditches can be found almost everywhere and are usually around two to three feet deep and about one to one and a half feet across.  Roads are the most common thing that has them and for that pattern to work, there are a few things that have to go.  Shoulders are likely considered a waste of space and a curb on the side of the road would only mess up how the drainage ditches work, things like guard rails to keep your van on the road in case something bad happened are clearly a concept for the weak.  This gives our speed racer inspired traffic acrobats less room to maneuver and a very easy to fall into ditch to wreck a wheel or a whole car in or as one’s imagination is spinning tales, off of the road, down a cliff, off of a banana tree or twelve and then right into the ocean off the cliffs at the bottom.

There are huge long stretches that have no lines on the road at all to assist the effort of staying on them. The general up and down and hyper-twisty nature of the roads regularly means you see traffic coming at 90 degree angles that you would assume is someone merging into the road, but is in fact just traffic moving in its own lane opposite yours.  People of all shapes and sizes walk on the sides of these streets both near cities and out in villages near the banana trees.  To the crazier types out there it could be considered sport driving in the same way a guy with a gun in the woods could be considered a sport.  I often wondered if we were going to be in the bus that took out the entire 4th grade class from a smaller village on the way.  After an hour of this, you are truly ready to be at your destination, and are also comically kind of used to it.  It was good to be at our resort finally.