In 2012 I was on a clowning trip with my best friend, Patch Adams, and a group of other volunteer clowns in Guatemala City. “Guate” was one of the most dangerous cities in the world. Our purpose was to go to orphanages and hospitals, mental institutions and, well, clown around. Make people smile, make the kids laugh, make a connection. Just what Patch Adams does. The real one, not Robin Williams in the movie. Lots of stories came from that trip. But the one that makes me cry almost every time I tell it is the old folks home.

A retirement community is way overstating what it was. A series of one-story, cinderblock buildings. Each old person had a room which looked more holding-cell like, than a home. A basic bed, small table, a chair. A few staff people flitting around the compound.

I had been living in Mexico for quite some time and knew poverty. But there was something about walking the grounds of this stark place that made the air feel heavier. Desperate. Lonelier. In Latin America, family takes care of the elderly. There was no family here.

We were there for a special lunch in a community room. Music playing, somebody’s birthday, clowning around with these old people as they ate their sandwiches on white bread. (White bread? No tortillas?)

In the corner was an old woman with fresh lipstick on. She had a small frail body like little old ladies do. Long hair pulled back from her face. You could tell in her earlier days she was a beauty. Like the vintage Buicks and Chevrolets still rolling through Havana. Dings, a touch of rust, and still something regal about them. She was dancing to the beat with a sock monkey. Just a toy. Dancing in the corner like no one was watching.

Except I was.

A woman who had probably lived better days. Days dancing with friends and family, at weddings, at parties, at birthdays. A whole life. Here she was, dancing with a sock monkey.

I choked up.

At the same time, maybe I had a raw nerve deep down. I didn’t have kids. Maybe when I’m old I will become the old lady dancing in the corner.

Maybe that is what triggers the tears

Maybe a glimpse of possible reality.

When I got there it was jungle. Sand roads, and one gas station in Playa. One in Tulum. A garbage dump where the Playacar aviary is now. The state of Quintana Roo was younger than my little sister. Everybody was a transplant. People from Mexico City who saw an El Dorado. Mayans who didn’t speak much Spanish saw work, foreigners seeking a better life saw a paradise. People running toward something, people running away from something. All of us figuring it out with whatever was at hand.

I stayed 27 years.

What I saw in that time, people going today will never see. Not because I was special. Because I was early. Because I was stubborn. Because going home meant failure and I was not going to fail.

These are those stories.

Not just Mexico. A life spent in places most people see on a map and wonder about. Smoking shisha in Istanbul. Jane Goodall’s chimps in Tanzania. Schooners in Greenland. A clown suit in Guatemala City. The first internet reservation service on that coast, built before most people knew what the internet was.

I never thought any of it was remarkable. It was just what I did.

My brothers in arms, Jim Coke and Dan Lins, told some of their stories over happy hour. They’re gone now. And their stories were buried with them.

I’m not going to let that happen to my stories.

You don’t have to go to the highest mountain or the deepest cave to have an amazing life. But if you’ve ever stood at the edge of something and wondered whether to jump, these stories are for you.

I’m a woman who after all these years is still trying to figure it out.

Welcome.

In the spring of 1985, I was a senior at Clarion University in Pennsylvania. A band geek. Marching band, jazz band, concert band. I played the baritone sax. The biggest in the saxophone family. It was almost bigger than I was. The university announced a trip for the symphony to Mexico. The director said they didn’t need a bari player. But if I could learn bass clarinet, I was in.

I learned.

The harder part was the money. My parents were going through a rough spot. I may have embellished the home situation when I pleaded with the director for a scholarship. I got it.

The only other big city I had ever experienced was a field trip to NYC in high school.

Landing in Mexico City, I had a nervous excitement I had never felt before. Spanish was not really spoken in the US at the time. At least not in Pennsylvania. Everything was foreign. VW Beetles, trucks, horns, men pushing diablos stacked with cases of Cokes. The city felt enormous and small at the same time.

We were told no shorts. Prostitutes wore shorts.

One evening a group of us girls went to a bar around the corner from the hotel. Guys took turns singing songs in Spanish and we would sing them back in English. Happy Birthday, back and forth, two languages. That night a car literally jumped the curb in front of the tuba player in her scooter-skirt.

I spent one afternoon sitting on the steps of the Presidente Hotel flirting with the doormen. When they got closer, I’d scoot up a couple steps toward the doors. They’d back away. I’d scoot back down. Nobody said a word. Teasing on the staircase.

Our first concert was at the Palacio de Bellas Artes. There was no internet. No photos I had scrolled through beforehand. So I had zero expectations. Inside, the ceiling made the space feel cavernous. I was sitting in the middle of the orchestra, watching people filter in through the doors at the back of the room.

I had been playing bass clarinet for six months. I was faking it and I knew it.

But when the music started, the acoustics took over. The sound blended and filled the room. The music hung in mid air. Whatever I was honking got swallowed by the hall. Only me and the person sitting next to me knew.

We played three concerts.

One day we toured the ruins of Teotihuacan. Arid, dusty, the sun scorching. No people hawking t-shirts, keychains, or ceramic mini-pyramids. On the way back we stopped at some roadside stalls. I bought some obsidian bookends and a handmade tablecloth. My mom still uses it. At this pitstop I had my first taste of pulque, a fermented drink that dates back to pre-Hispanic Mesoamerica.

The next morning off to Acapulco.

Acapulco was small then. People sunning themselves. Little kids swimming in their underwear, clutching their mother’s leg. Barkers with their wares going blanket to blanket on the sand.

Saturday night we played at Sinfonia del Mar. An open-air amphitheater near the famous La Quebrada Cliffs. Our backs to the sea, playing into the carved stone seating that amplified our sound. Waves crashed behind us and seemed to blend with the music. Across the water you could see the Tarzan House, once owned by Johnny Weissmuller and John Wayne. After the concert, our hosts provided mezcal in bamboo shot glasses. They told us to just shoot it back. It was vile tasting. We all shot it back anyway.

Our last day was Easter Sunday. A bunch of us attended mass. Not in one of the churches like Mexico City, the ones that looked like architectural art. This was a cinderblock building. Unfinished. Rebar protruding from the top of the support beams. One block back from the hotel, one block back from the beach, and it could have been a different country.

Five months later, an earthquake leveled parts of Mexico City. The opera house survived.

When I stepped off the plane and on to the tarmac, the humidity wrapped around me like a warm, wet blanket. I love that feeling. A baby blue and white Volkswagen bus (a combi), was waiting to take us south along the Cancun-Tulum corridor to Akumal. The combi’s sliding side door was missing and a side of a baby crib acted as a door. One set of the bench seats was removed so dive gear bags could be stacked. I sat on top, I was in charge of the beer. A cooler filled with cervezas bien fria. All of us knocked back beers, including the driver. And I watched the side of the road through the baby crib slats.

The highway 307 (or the carretera) to Tulum was equivalent to a rural road in the US. Far from the likes of the four lanes of today. Driving was certainly the most dangerous part of any trip. No shoulder, and if you catch the edge, it meant a tumble over the edge and into the jungle. And possible death.

The same shitty road into Aventuras Akumal still exists today as you get off the highway.

Our group stayed at a condo on the beach. Gary and I were offered the “crowsnest” a roof-top, palapa covered room. It was there where we were robbed the first night. I wish I could say it was the only time I have been robbed. It was not. The next day, a passport turned up in the shower. Another passport and wallet were gone. The second passport was later found in the jungle.

We took our dive group in that combi with the baby crib door, to the dive sites. Quite literally we would park alongside the road, careful not to topple into the jungle, and trek into the jungle with our gear.

We always asked the land owner for permission to dive. The owners often lived in a palapa with little or no electricity. A coke, or a small package of cookies, or a couple of pesos served as a thank you.

Today many of the cenotes have concrete or wooden stairways leading from the jungle floor to the water. We had barely a path to follow, sometimes jumping from heights to get into the water. Gran Cenote which tour buses frequent, had one single parking space, and a stick ladder to climb out. Each step was strategically placed on the wobbly rungs. One cenote Maya Blue now referred to as Cristalino was an effort for me to climb out of. Slippery rocks, grabbing saplings. My right leg slipped in between two rocks, up to my knee. I fell backwards. Landing on my doubles, on my back. “Is my light ok?”

Cave lights back then were custom-made plexiglass canisters with a battery inside. Crafted in someone’s garage in Florida. Heavy, expensive, and they don’t bounce well. The light survived. My knee, not as lucky.

I hobbled. It was the middle of our trip. I wanted to keep diving. That night I retold the story to our hosts. Someone produced a handful of pain meds. I continued to dive painfree and a wee bit woozy.

The big dive of any trip was to Nohoch Nah Chich, Mayan for the big bird house owned by Don Pedro. Mike Madden has been the primary explorer of the cave system. A couple-kilometer hike into the jungle. Don Pedro’s boys lashed our gear and tanks on to horses as we followed them through the scrubby jungle.

The boys used a rope through a crotch of a tree, as a makeshift pulley. Lowering our gear down to a stick platform at the water’s edge The staging area to set up for the dive. The water was so clear you could see the white calcite dunes and glimpses of the stalactites from the surface.

Returning to Baltimore I went to Johns Hopkins Sports Medicine Center for my knee. Of course the doctor wanted to know how the injury happened. As they were running tests, the attending doctor kept bringing in other staff saying “tell them how you got hurt, tell them,” and they looked at me like I was crazy.

No life altering injury, but my knee aches became a barometer while diving if I was close to getting “bent” (decompression sickness), and if it is going to rain.

And Mike Madden, whose dive shop filled my tanks, less than two years later he became my boss.

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I worked my way up in the PADI dive certifications and became a dive master for Sea Colony Aquasports. Aside from the general public we also did scuba training for the midshipmen at the Annapolis Naval Academy. Ah, the middies in their summer whites…. Oops I digress. Certification dives were done in a Pennsylvania quarry shadowed by the Three Mile Island Nuclear power plant silos. Love check out dives with the middies, yes ma’am, no ma’am.

It was there I met a dive instructor, Gary. I flirted with him over pizza and beer.

Gary and I talked on my commute home from work, almost every night. I had a cell phone, the big box one that sat between the two front seats. In that first month my cellular bill was well over $1200. I would talk about ads I had read about becoming a commercial diver, a merchant marine, or joining the Coast Guard. He shared stories about underwater cave exploration in Belize. Teaching cave diving in Florida. Cave diving. Huh? Never heard of it.

Finally, Gary asked me out on a date. The issue was that I had recently got engaged to a guy in Atlanta. A short-lived engagement, with an ugly ending, for another day.

One night sitting in a booth over dinner, I told Gary diving was number one and he was number two and as long as he understood that, we would get along great.

Weekends spent diving, rock climbing or working on house renovations he had started on his childhood home, where I then lived.

I had found a pair of rusty steel 72 cubic foot tanks in a barn in Virginia. The tanks were visually inspected at the dive shop. Gary offered to teach me how to dive doubles.

Off to the Three Mile Island quarry.

The steel tanks would turn me over on my back like a turtle. Over and over. Fighting each time to right myself.

It was not fun. I was frustrated. Crying in my dive mask. Gary said, “forget it, just get out of the water.” I took his words as dismissive and that pissed me off. I showed him. I fought my way to stay right side up, swam around and stubbornly crawled on my hands and knees on the shore getting out of the water on my own. So there.

I then started learning how to cave dive. I started my training in my rusty 72’s down in Florida, camping at Spring Systems. I was trying to learn the gear and the rules of cave diving. Wrestling my 72’s into the fill station at the end of each dive.

Some guy sat there watching me, grinning, asking about my tanks and if they were new. I looked at him like he was crazy. Telling him to look at the scuffed up paint and rust, no they are not new. Later that evening I learned that guy at the fill station was Sheck Exley, probably the most accomplished cave diver who ever lived.

Sheck was teasing, ME!

I had not finished my certification. Gary and I started running cave diving trips to Mexico anyway in 1990. Mexico. The mecca of cave diving. We stayed in Aventuras Akumal.

An area I did not know was going to become my home.

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I went back to school for a master’s in travel and tourism for two reasons:

1. With nothing to do, I was afraid I would start having gin for breakfast.

2. I felt like I needed an advanced degree to validate myself and my 27+ years working in tourism and hospitality, while living on a dirt road.

I have a stack of certifications and accolades, all trying to prove something to someone.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I love learning and enjoy school.

It took a getaway to the south of France to see it. Since the day I handed the keys to the new owner of Loco Gringo, I have been presenting a sanitized, vanilla version of myself.

Then AI came along.

Being a bit of a geek, I jumped into the deep end of the pool. I built an AI app. Spent a fortune. Shut it down. Tried consulting. Cared more about their businesses than they did. Started writing frameworks on Substack. It was mechanical and unsatisfying.

I have changed my Substack. To share the stories of being an expat, an explorer, and a traveler. A guest and a host. Avoiding potholes in business. And about life held together with duct tape.

If you are a already a subscriber, there will be some nuggets of knowledge still. You may not recognize the tone. It’s the real me. No workflows or frameworks. Gritty details of boots-on-the-ground, bruises, and scars from witnessing a civilization grow from the end of a dirt road.

And if you unsubscribe, I understand. There are lots of consultants and people teaching how to promote your property on TikTok. But that person won’t be me.

Buckle up, because sometimes you can’t make this shit up.

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