Wow, five months went by really fast. It doesn’t feel like it’s been that long since I (Dirk) was hobbling around Seoul, wondering how long my knee would take to heal. And here we find ourselves in Port Aransas, Texas reflecting on the last five months.

On the Mend!

The good news is the torn meniscus in my left knee has been healing well. Maybe not as quickly as I had hoped (yeah, I’m not 20 anymore), but it could definitely be worse. The tear was slight, and the orthopedic surgeon who examined my MRI never even mentioned the word surgery.

About three weeks after returning to Texas, I was able to start putting a little weight on it. Since then, it’s continued to steadily improve, and now I’m able to do easy hikes of a few miles and handle stairs. Walking on the beach here in Port Aransas has been great rehab. However, I am certainly looking forward to being able to hike more challenging terrain in the very near future again.

Mexican Food – Yum!

Although we were bummed to end our RTW early, it’s been good to be home. We spent the first few weeks after our return binging on Mexican food. We did find some good Mexican food during our travels in some unexpected locations. One of our favorites was on the island of Koh Phanang in Thailand at a fun little place called Ando Loco. The food was great, but we had a really funny experience there.

On their menu they have two kinds of enchiladas, chicken and vegetable. When we asked if they could make cheese enchiladas for us, we were told that it was a physical impossibility because the cheese would all run out when it melted. That is so funny to us because cheese enchiladas are the anchor of all Mexican food restaurants here at home. It’s literally how those places are judged. The food at Ando’s was great, though, and we ate there every day during our three day stay on the island.

Back to Work

We didn’t really know when we first came back home to Texas how long we would be here. At first we thought it would just be maybe about three months. At the rate my knee has been healing, that wouldn’t have really worked out too well anyway. One of the reasons we came home for my knee to heal, rather than just hole up somewhere inexpensive in Asia, were the opportunities to make some money here compared to being elsewhere. After 14 months of traveling, our bank account was ready for some replenishing. So, we have made commitments that will have us here until at least July. We have been back to working our essential oils business, and Bev has been practicing law again.

Our First Book — Woo hoo!

It was in December when we committed to being here until July. So, we decided we may as well write a book while we’re here. We entered an intensive 9-week program for authors to take their books from just an idea to a finished manuscript. Consequently, it’s been a crazy couple of months. We just turned in our manuscript, and we’ll be off to D.C. this weekend for a few days for a publishing and marketing workshop. We’ll let y’all know when it gets published in a couple of months. It’s not the book we thought we were going to write for our first one, but we’re excited! There will be more to come, as well.

Port Aransas – Jewel of the Texas Coast

Since the work allows us to be mostly location-independent, we’ve been blessed to have access to my mom’s condo at the Aransas Princess in Port Aransas. We’ve always loved it here, and we have been trying to spend as much of our time here as we can. It’s certainly been the perfect place to work on the book and everything else we’ve got going on.

Port Aransas is one of our favorite places here in Texas. Although it’s mostly been the off-season, there is still plenty to do here and there are a lot of great restaurants. We haven’t really been leaving the condo much, due to the work we’ve been doing. However, we’ve made at least a little progress on our quest to try out every restaurant in town that we started before our RTW trip.

Some of our favorites include Virginia’s, Trout St., Fins, Cancun, La Barataria, Roosevelt’s, Shell’s, Seafood & Spaghetti Works, and Irie’s. A couple of our favorites on nearby Padre Island are Doc’s and La Isla. This past weekend happened to be Texas SandFest, so it was a bit crowded in town. We did manage to make it down there on Sunday afternoon to check out some of the cool sand sculptures.

Lake Travis, San Antonio and New Braunfels

Also, a beautiful home was offered to us to use at Lake Travis near Austin for five weeks while the very generous owners were vacationing in Asia. We weren’t there a whole lot, but did take advantage of that a couple of times and enjoyed being in that area a little. Otherwise, we’ve been in San Antonio and New Braunfels a lot as well.

I’m Burnin’, I’m Burnin’, I’m Burnin’ for You

In addition to all of that fun, a couple of highlights for us since coming home have been attending two of Texas’ eight regional burns. The first one, FreezerBurn, was in January; and the second one, San Antonio’s inaugural burn called AlmaBurn, was in early April. We’re also looking forward to Burning Flipside in May near Austin. Burning Flipside started in 1999, and it was the first regional burn outside of Burning Man.

The camp that we co-host is called Guerrilla Cheese Camp. Our gift to the community is 100 to 120 grilled cheese sandwiches served each day of the event at lunchtime and a variety of cocktails at various times of the day at our bar. We had an amazing time at the eight international burns we attended on our RTW trip, but it’s been nice to be at our home burns and reconnect with friends after being gone last year.

What’s Next?

At this point, we are planning on heading to South America in July for a month or two. We’ll certainly keep you posted on that, too. That is right around the time our book will be publishing, so we’ll see how that affects our plans at that time. Anyway, that’s it for now. We just wanted to give you a quick update, and hope that you are enjoying your Spring!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

• almaburn
• aransas princess
• freezerburn
• port aransas
• sandfest
• sunset
• texas